“Tucson is Pachuco territory.”

It’s not something a historian says or a phrase you’ll find on a map. But it’s known to David Alvarado, director of “American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez.”

His documentary follows the life of the activist, director and playwright who brought the popular slang known as Caló, the Pachucos and Chicano stories from California’s farmworker fields to Broadway and Hollywood. Caló is a Mexican American slang from the 1930s and 1940s. Pachucos were members of a youth subculture known for the Zoot suit, with long jackets and wide-legged pants.

“This film has Arizona in its blood,” Alvarado says.

Perhaps that is why Tucson feels like such a natural and welcoming place to bring the documentary. The film will premiere at The Loft Cinema Friday, Sept. 4.

Why, for Alvarado, does this documentary carry Arizona — and Tucson — within it?

The answer begins long before Luis Valdez arrived on Broadway with “Zoot Suit,” the first Chicano play in New York’s Broadway theater district.

Valdez was born in Delano, California, in 1940. His parents, Armida and Francisco, were born in Arizona, his father in Nogales and his mother in Tucson. He tells the story himself in the opening minutes of the film, almost as if leaving a clue about where everything else comes from.

Then comes Lalo Guerrero, “The Original Chicano,” from Tucson’s Barrio Viejo, who became one of the voices that put music to the Pachuco figure. Ad there is legendary singer Linda Ronstadt, another Tucson native and member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, whose beloved Mexican voice is also part of the documentary.

Arizona appears throughout the film, name by name, voice by voice.

And then there is Chicano Caló. The style. The way Pachucos moved between two worlds without fully belonging to either one. An identity that, Alvarado says, was forged in border cities, much like Tucson.

That is why, for him, “American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez” does not come to Tucson as someone else’s story.

It arrives with Mexican last names.

With Mexican music.

With words that already carry memories across México, Indigenous lands and the U.S..

Alvarado hopes Tucson audiences will not sit down in front of the screen simply to learn someone else’s story, but to recognize a part of their own.

“It’s a legacy,” says the acclaimed Chicano documentarian, who is from Dallas, Texas.

“¡Vamos pa’l Chuco!”

One theory about the origin of the word “pachuco” connects it to the border expression “¡Vamos pa’l Chuco!”, referring to El Paso, Texas. The term is believed to have emerged along the border between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso and, over time, came to identify the young people who shaped this culture.

Pachucos built their own Mexican American identity in the Southwest United States and México during the early 1900s. Their style, marked by the Zoot suit, with its regal long-tailed jackets and gaucho wide-legged pants. And speaking Chicano Caló slang, owning their way, owning their language, with a mix of Spanish, English and community sayings, standing as symbols of their own identity.

Pachuco culture also found its voice in artists on both sides of the border, from Germán Valdés “Tin Tan” and Adalberto Martínez Chávez “Resortes” in México, to Lalo Guerrero and Don Tosti in the United States. Decades later, Valdez and James Olmos would bring the figure of El Pachuco to the stage and screen with “Zoot Suit.”

Chicanos at the center

Luis Valdez is much more than an American playwright, filmmaker and activist, Alvarado says. Valdez, he says, is the founder of El Teatro Campesino is the father of Chicano theater, the man who brought the first Chicano play, “Zoot Suit,” at ”full volume” and “without subtitles and without apology” to Broadway, he says.

He is the man who, amid the rise of films such as “RoboCop,” “Dirty Dancing” and “Indiana Jones,” put a Chicano family at the center of the big screen with “La Bamba.” The 1987 film features Ritchie Valens, whose recording was the only song in Spanish included on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest songs.

Valdez has also used storytelling as a tool for social justice, when he began making theater on farmworker protest lines alongside farmworker leaders César Chávez and Dolores Huerta. His own family also worked in the fields.

Valdez is now 86. In hours of interviews with the artist, the film delves into his life through his own voice. The narration is performed by Edward James Olmos, who reprises “El Pachuco,” the seminal character Valdez created for “Zoot Suit.”

The documentary has already found success at the Sundance Film Festival this year, where it received the Audience Award in the U.S. Documentary Competition and the Festival Favorite Award.

“The awards mean a lot, but what I keep thinking about is what happens inside the theaters. Lowriders outside sold-out screenings in Fresno,” Alvarado says. “Audiences applauding through the end credits in the Bay Area. Three generations of the same family sitting in a single row.”

For Alvarado, those stories do not end when the screening does. “They’re still present in the living rooms of many homes in Tucson.”

The story offers a journey through the Chicano and Mexican American experience: Its struggles. Its contradictions, And the identity of an ignored artist who made himself heard through his stories.

A story that began with “Do the thing. Now!”

To understand what led David Alvarado to tell Luis Valdez’s story, we have to go back to when he was 21. At a scholarship ceremony for Latino students at a university in Texas, Valdez, the man behind “La Bamba,” was the keynote speaker. At the end of his speech ,Valdez pointed to the students and shouted: “Do the thing. Now!”

“Luis changed my life before I even picked up a camera,” Alvarado said. He remembers being one of the students in the room.

“I walked out of that room wanting to be an artist,” he says.

Alvarado spent the next 15 years making science documentaries. But when he finally turned the camera toward his own identity, every road led him back to Valdez.

“A kid born in a farmworker camp invents a theater on a protest line and takes it all the way to Broadway and Hollywood,” he says of the subject of his latest film. “And his whole story had never been told in a feature-length documentary. So we made it.”

Alvarado looks back at the questions Luis Valdez began asking in 1965. He finds an unsettling relevance today.

“Who feeds this country with their labor? Who gets to be American? What stories deserve to be on a stage?” he asks. “They’re the same questions in 2026.”

That is why, the filmmaker says, the movie does not feel like a period piece.

And perhaps that is the power of the story Alvarado wanted to tell: “I think people are hungry for a story where the response to injustice is creativity and joy instead of despair.”

Near the end of the film, one line captures that idea: “The point isn’t just that Chicanos belong in America, but that America is Chicano.”

NOW PLAYING

American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez

Where: The Loft Cinema

Premiere: Friday, Sept. 4 — 12:15 PM · 4:15 PM · 7:00 PM

After the 7:00 p.m. screening: Q&A with director David Alvarado and producer Everett Katigbak

General admission: $11.50 | Students/teachers/military with ID: $9.50 | Seniors (65+): $8.50 | Children (12 and under): $8.50 | Loft members: $6.00

Before the screening: Classic lowriders from 5:30 p.m.

Screenings: Sept. 4-10

Director: David Alvarado

Written by: David Alvarado and Roberto Eduardo Arenas Farquet

Cinematography: Zachary Fink

Production company: Insignia Films

This article first appeared on AZ Luminaria and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The Crux

Marana gave a 28-acre church sports complex the zoning rights Oro Valley spent five years debating, despite unresolved questions about traffic, lighting, noise, and neighborhood protections.

Then, minutes later, the council honored the ecologist whose wildlife map was designed to keep exactly this kind of development out of sensitive corridors.

The contrast says a lot about what Marana chooses to scrutinize — and what it chooses to wave through.

🌵 They Clapped for the Wildlife Map After Paving Over It

Marana honored William Shaw moments after approving development within the regional wildlife corridor he helped define.

by Three Sonorans

Starting in 2020, the Oro Valley Church of the Nazarene asked its own town for a 40-foot sanctuary and sports facility with lighted night-play athletic fields at its Calle Concordia campus. Oro Valley’s Planning and Zoning Commission rejected the 40-foot version by a 3-2 vote in early 2023, citing noise, glare, and traffic incompatibility with the surrounding neighborhood.

The church came back smaller: in April 2024, the Oro Valley Town Council unanimously approved a scaled-down 36-foot sanctuary with an attached recreational sports space, four feet short of what the church originally wanted. Five years, two hearings, one compromise.

Tuesday night, Marana said yes to the bigger version in twenty minutes.

Mayor Jon Post didn’t wait for a staff recommendation to settle or another council member to move; he made the motion himself, and Ordinance 2026.015 passed on a voice vote, reclassifying 28.1 acres at Twin Peaks Road and Desert Falcon Lane from single-family residential (R-36) to a master-planned commercial and religious footprint for the Oro Valley Church of the Nazarene (OVCN). According to OVCN’s site plan, the parcel is home to nearly 300 mature saguaros and 180 desert ironwood trees.

When your neighbors say no, apparently, you find a friendlier zip code.

How Marana Said Yes

The developer’s representative framed the rezoning as a modest formality, since churches, ballfields, and schools are already permitted under residential zoning, and argued the custom plan was needed only to lift the standard 30-foot residential height cap to 40 feet, the extra ten feet required for competitive volleyball’s indoor clearance rules.

A stack of formal petition signatures from surrounding residents might have forced a three-quarters supermajority vote instead of a simple majority. The town attorney announced the petitions had arrived Tuesday morning, missing a statutory noon deadline from the previous business day.

With that technicality resolved, Post’s simple majority was all it took.

Entitlements First, Studies Later

Seven nearby homeowners spoke against the plan, warning that a rural residential pocket was being sacrificed for a regional sports hub without basic due diligence.

Gerald Donaldson, who lives on Desert Falcon Lane, told the council he’d moved there for a reason: the road is narrow and partially unpaved, unequipped for hundreds of daily trips it would suddenly need to carry. Others warned that lighting outdoor athletic fields for night games would blast light across a neighborhood that has always been dark-sky.

Town staff confirmed that no outdoor lighting study had been submitted and no traffic impact analysis conducted. Under Marana’s rules, those operational realities won’t be evaluated until the development-plan stage, well after the council has already granted the zoning rights.

OVCN Executive Pastor Chris Collins told the dais that the church’s sports ministry already runs four youth leagues serving more than 500 children a year from rented facilities, constrained only by the lack of a gym of its own. That landed well.

Mayor Post called a privately built sports complex “pretty exciting,” noting Marana has struggled to fund public recreation amenities for its growing suburban population.

Vice Mayor Roxanne Ziegler dismissed resident concerns as complaints about “problems you don’t know yet” and called Oro Valley’s four years of resistance to the church “disgraceful.”

Council Member Patrick Cavanaugh spent more time cross-examining the applicant than anyone else on the dais, and kept coming up against the same wall: a plan with the answers still pending.

He asked whether the property would even be fenced; the applicant’s representative said staff was “still working on that.”

He asked for the church’s expected peak traffic times; residents, he noted, “are concerned about a lot of traffic.”

He asked what specific protections neighbors would get on “noise, lighting, and evening sports events right in their backyards.”

He questioned the technical case for the extra ten feet outright: “Let’s talk about the 40-foot request for volleyball. Why 40 feet, why not 35? Have there been studies on how high these balls bounce?” The applicant’s own consultant conceded he was “no volleyball expert.”

When Cavanaugh pressed on what the neighborhood meetings had actually surfaced, the applicant allowed that concerns included traffic, noise, lighting, and proximity to a quiet neighborhood, prompting Cavanaugh’s sharpest line of the night:

“What you just said really struck me. What was once a quiet neighborhood won’t be quiet, a lot of the time, during the day and on weekends.”

The applicant’s answer amounted to disagreement without rebuttal. By the time the vote came, Cavanaugh had one closing comment left: he remained “very concerned about the footprint” and lighting placed “right up against these houses,” and hoped the church could “help minimize it.”

And Then, Minutes Later, the Council Did Something Almost Too On-the-Nose to Write

The next agenda item was a wildlife corridor dedication.

Resolution 2026-063 formally designates the Marana portion of a landscape connection, a stretch distinct from the Avra Valley segment Pima County named for Shaw back in March, as the William Shaw Wildlife Corridor, honoring University of Arizona wildlife ecologist Dr. William Shaw for his 1986 report, “Critical and Sensitive Wildlife Habitats in Eastern Pima County,” staff still call the “bunny map.”

It charted the movement paths linking Tohono O’odham land with Ironwood Forest National Monument, threading through the Tucson Mountains and across the Santa Cruz River to the Tortolita Mountains. Shaw’s research later shaped the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan and the Conservation Lands System, whose 25th anniversary this resolution marked.

Jackie Craig, a Marana resident and board member of Friends of Ironwood Forest, called the dedication ceremony “wonderful” and “very moving.”

The council gave Shaw warm applause.

Nobody on the dais seemed to notice the whiplash. Twenty minutes earlier, they’d voted to clear land from within the very regional wildlife-linkage network Shaw had spent his career mapping. Now they were clapping for the map.

A Pattern With a Price Tag

Land and habitat weren’t the only things Marana approved first and priced out later.

The corridor and the gymnasium weren’t the only numbers in tension Tuesday night. Down the agenda, the true cost of Marana’s suburban growth came due: the council approved transferring $4.2 million from its New Renewable Water Resource Acquisition fund to cover a shortfall on the Water Reclamation Facility Phase II Expansion.

The remaining gap will be plugged with future municipal debt. Staff insisted that water rate hikes fund maintenance, not capital expansion, but the arithmetic traces a familiar Northwest corridor pattern: government finances rapid growth through debt, and existing residents absorb the disruption.

It’s the same math problem as the church gym and the corridor, just measured in dollars instead of acreage.

What Actually Deserved Twenty Minutes

A megachurch sports complex got extensive applicant testimony, council cross-examination, and a formal vote. Two other things came up Tuesday night that got neither.

A Marana father described attending a roadside memorial for an 11-year-old sixth-grader struck and killed while riding his bicycle at Midfield Road and Hancock Drive on August 20. He recounted meeting the boy’s father at the crash site, standing with him where the accident happened, and then watching a car pass the memorial the very next morning at roughly 50 miles per hour. Gladden Farms Elementary and Tangerine Farms Middle School were built as neighborhood schools with minimal busing, designed on the assumption that children would walk or bike safely. He asked the council for an urgent public-safety audit of the walking and biking corridors around both schools and for a resident safety task force to help design the response. It’s the kind of infrastructure problem that doesn’t come with a developer’s rendering or a sports ministry attached, and Tuesday’s agenda treated it accordingly: as a public-comment item, not a headline vote.

A resident used his three minutes to press town leaders on something the agenda didn’t mention: whether Marana police have intergovernmental operating agreements with Management and Training Corporation (MTC), the private prison operator preparing to open a federal ICE detention facility he said was reportedly scheduled for November 30.

He read from MTC’s own proposed contract language requiring “disturbance control teams” and authority to use force, then laid out the company’s record: a 2010 escape from an MTC-run facility in Kingman that ended in a double murder in New Mexico, and a later multi-day riot at a state-owned Arizona facility MTC operated.

“That’s very important,” he told the council, “because they are not a good operator of facilities, and we need to talk about this.” He wanted to know whether police resources committed to the facility would come at Marana’s expense. The town manager’s response was brief: MTC has shared no timeline for openings or operational data with the town. Nobody followed up.

A church gym got a mayoral motion, a voice vote, and an hour of scrutiny over volleyball ceiling heights. A dead child and a federal detention facility got ninety seconds each and silence. That’s not an oversight. That’s a council telling you, agenda item by agenda item, exactly where its attention lives.

Also on the Agenda

• Twin Peaks Crossings pipeline: The council approved a fourth contract amendment extending the construction window to October 2027 and requiring developer Red Wing Investments to build an upgraded 16-inch water transmission main along Angel Drive.

• Airport infrastructure grants: Ratified two state aviation grants totaling $630,000 for runway safety mitigation and taxiway rehabilitation design at Marana Regional Airport.

Have a scoop or a story you want us to follow up on?

Send us a message below or via ENCRYPTED email (all messages kept CONFIDENTIAL) at ThreeSonorans@protonmail.com.

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by Yana Kunichoff, AZ Luminaria

It may not have been easy exactly, but it was more manageable for Tree Lafferty to spend Arizona summers unhoused when she was younger. As Lafferty aged, sitting on the hot concrete, or being nudged along from shady downtown spaces, felt harder to take. “I was a lot stronger,” said Lafferty, 61. “There was much less pain involved.”

Last year was the first time she used a cooling center, and she wandered into the one run by St. Francis Community Services from the Ward 3 council office in part because the center is managed by a longtime friend.

“That summer, the favorite number of the weather forecaster was 108,” she laughed. “I didn’t know cooling centers were a thing [until I heard about] this one.”

Last year, the cooling center was able to stay open through October, when the temperature hit an unusual fall level of 100 degrees because the Ward 3 council office used leftover COVID relief money to help stretch operations for an extra month.

This year, between more competition for fewer grants and a sparser donation landscape, that money is gone.

“Nonprofits are really struggling,” said Shawn Milligan, director of operations of St. Francis Community Services. “Funding is scarce, and with a lot of grants that we have gone for, there are at least twice as many other folks going for that same money.”

While Southern Arizona shimmers under the extreme heat of summer, the cooling center is not alone in its resource crunch. Senior serving institutions aid some of the most heat-vulnerable community members, and amid the dip in people who stay in town and fewer federal grants this year, they are doing that work with less money and less support on the ground.

Nonprofits and governments are collaborating more to fill that gap, even as they stare down a challenge of extreme heat that climate data suggests will only get worse.

As temperatures ticked up this summer, the Eastside Neighbors Volunteer Program, which connects volunteer drivers with seniors in Tucson needing help accessing groceries or support getting to doctor’s appointments, has seen its volunteer ranks thin as snowbirds escape the extreme summer heat.

“We lose so many of our drivers — they get the heck out of Tucson,” said Becky Noel, the group’s executive director. “It puts a hardship on us.”

Donations to AllThrive 365, a Phoenix-area nonprofit working with seniors around the state, drop in the summer as many locals leave for the season. That’s exactly when the organization’s phones begin ringing off the hook with emergency cooling repair requests during the stretches of 100-plus degree heat.

“The need always outweighs the funding,” Elena Burr, the director of communications and outreach, said. “The lowest donation month is the highest need we see.”

As Trump administration cuts hollow out the social safety net and slow federal heat-relief funding, Southern Arizona’s nonprofits are being forced into a bigger, under-resourced frontline role protecting seniors from increasingly deadly, increasingly long summers

In 2024, Tucson had 112 days of 100 degree-plus heat, more than any year on record so far, according to the National Weather Service. In 2025, Tucson hit 100 degrees April 11, more than a week earlier than the previous record of April 19 in 1989. That record was broken in 2026, when Tucson had its first 100-degree day in March.

“It’s one of those invisible disasters. It doesn’t have this start and end — it’s a long duration event,” said Courtney Slanaker, head of the American Red Cross of Southern Arizona chapter. “For us, we’ve always been that disaster response agency where you see people’s boots on the ground right after impact. With heat it’s very hard to define — our job is really to communicate effective risk strategies.”

Doing more with less

As access to federal grants shrinks and need rises, nonprofits have become a crucial part of public heat relief work in Arizona, becoming governmental partners whose engagement is built into the process.

Here are some ways local governments are partnering with nonprofits.

“With the new administration and a lot of cuts in funding, that wasn’t a choice: we needed to work together. Everybody’s funding was reduced,” city of Tucson chief resilience officer Fatima Luna said.

For example, in 2025 the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation lost $1.5 million in funds from a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services program that funds clinical and support services for people with HIV and AIDS

“No single institution can do heat work alone. That’s just unrealistic. Nonprofits and partnerships play a huge role.”

In Phoenix, AllThrive 365 is the 2026 distribution partner for the city of Phoenix heat relief program.

In the city of Tucson’s Heat Action Roadmap, adopted in 2024, nonprofit partners can develop and distribute culturally relevant informational materials, work on long-term greening projects and possibly apply for funding with local government.

Pima County’s 2026 heat plan identifies local nonprofits as partners for targeted outreach to particularly vulnerable populations like unhoused people and those who live in mobile homes — both groups with the highest risk of heat-related deaths.

In 2025, the Pima County Health Department launched a Heat Relief Grant Program specifically to support organizations working with unhoused women, using funding obtained through the state health department. The county also gave funding to local shelter Sister Jose’s Women’s Center to improve outdoor shading, and to Primavera Foundation to reduce heat illness among women living in STAR Village, the city’s outdoor safe living space.

This last year, a significant portion of the cooling center funding in Pima County was underwritten by federal dollars from the Center for Disease Control, but those are set to expire next year. (The Pima County Board of Supervisors is moving to use general funds moving ahead for that effort.)

Liza Kurtz is a senior research analyst with the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University. She has studied extreme heat indoors and outdoors but is currently completing a study of indoor heat in Maricopa County.

She called the current funding landscape in which American Rescue Plan Act funds were ending a looming financial cliff.

“The good news is it’s not something anyone has their heads in the sand about.”

Kurtz has seen a growing connection between government and nonprofits working on heat issues, from the state to local level.

“Nonprofits and community advocates, faith-based organizations, are the people who are closest to the folks that are affected,” Kurtz said. “I see a lot of reporting back to larger infrastructure [and government] from nonprofits.”

In September 2025, the Community Foundation for Southern Arizona surveyed local nonprofit organizations to see how they were faring amid the waves of federal cuts. While private donations and grants accounted for about half of nonprofit funding, nearly one year into the Trump administration, government grants from all levels was generally 27.5% of nonprofit funding.

With the widespread federal cuts under the Trump administration, about 15-20% of the organizations surveyed reported layoffs, while a majority of nonprofits surveyed (60-65%) said they had left open positions unfilled, reduced staff hours or implemented a hiring freeze.

On the funder side, Krista Millay, with the Community Foundation for Southern Arizona, said they are seeing extreme heat as an issue that touches almost everything, and have tried to think about funding support for it in the same way.

“Rather than thinking about heat as a separate funding category, we see it as something that cuts across many different issues.”

Also complicating the reality is that, while Southern Arizona is “incredibly generous,” Millay said, it is a different philanthropic market than Phoenix, 100-some miles to the north. “We have fewer Fortune 500 companies and fewer large corporate foundations, so our nonprofit community often depends on a broader mix of individual donors, local philanthropy, public funding, and collaboration.”

That has meant more collaboration, Millay says. “There’s a recognition that no one funder or nonprofit can solve our biggest challenges alone. Collaboration isn’t just a nice idea here — it’s often how progress gets made,” she said.

Still, collaboration can’t fully get past real resource constraints.

“One thing we talk about often is that philanthropy can do a lot, but it can’t do everything. Private philanthropy isn’t large enough to replace government funding,” Millay said.

Turning off the AC

In 2025, 117 people in Pima County died of heat-related causes, according to the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office. Two-thirds— 78 people — were over the age of 60. Of all the deaths, 42% occurred indoors

One key cause: cooling is often one of the first costs people cut back on — turning off their AC altogether or letting a broken unit go unrepaired.

“If you’re dealing with an illness, or you’re dealing with food insecurity or housing insecurity, it is very difficult to think about: how do I protect myself from a disaster or a heat event,” Slanaker said.

For a mix of reasons, Arizona had among the highest drop in the number of people receiving SNAP assistance: a drop of 54 percent from July 2025 to May 2026, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Kurtz, with ASU, has seen that play out across the state: if you used to get food aid but it was cut, you may cut back on how often you run your air conditioner.

“It’s very likely some of the money they don’t spend on food or rent will shift to paying bills,” she said. “It’s hard to track down exactly which money is going towards keeping people safe from extreme heat, and in some ways it’s all of it.”

A 2026 study by the Urban Institute found that one in three adults aged 60 or older had trouble paying their rent, mortgage or utility bills.

Angela Murphy, who runs the cooling center at Ward 3, said last summer, as Arizona’s SNAP participation began dropping precipitously, the center started drawing more than unhoused residents — also people avoiding cooling costs or needing more food than they had at home.

“I don’t want to turn people away, but we are not a nutrition assistance program. We are a cooling center. It really was like a senior center - and a lot of people were coming to get food,” she said. “When it’s harder to buy food, you’re going to spend less on AC.”

Murphy manages the center every day, coordinating cold drinks and food, but she also invites local nonprofits to come and hold office hours. Primavera may come through in the morning, then CODAC in the afternoon.

Murphy also knows the cost of heat stress well: even as she works at the cooling center she is concerned about the cost of cooling her own home.

Her partner works nights and is therefore resting during the day with their dogs. “We have to have it [the AC] on at all times. And there are still rooms in the house that are not cool. The bathrooms [are] over 100 degrees,” says Murphy. “It’s literally everybody across the city.”

More flexible funding

Fundraisers and managers say local nonprofits are looking not only for more funding, but money that they can use flexibly.

“When you get restricted dollars, it really ties the organization’s hands on being innovative and course correcting,” Slanaker said. “There’s times when you get into a program and you’re like, man, I really need a shift. But you’re restricted by your funder’s guidelines or expectations.”

Milligan of St. Francis Community Services said his organization’s accountant is a volunteer, making any onerous reporting requirement for grants almost not worth the staff time it would take to apply or do detailed grant reporting.

Tina Lopez, vice president of philanthropic services at Jewish Family & Children’s Services, said she tries to avoid restricted grants when possible, and to communicate that paying for staff and salaries is key to supporting the work of nonprofit organizations. “It’s like going into Starbucks and buying a cup of coffee and saying: I only want to pay for the beans for the coffee and the water that goes in it, I don’t want to pay for your salary, or the building that I’m coming into to get coffee.”

Like the need for flexible funding, some of the best tools to protect seniors amid extreme heat are about investing in a stronger social safety net writ large, a type of work that often doesn’t easily fall into any one funding bucket.

“Heat is not going away for Southern Arizona, so if we can [we should] build that social cohesion for adults or seniors living alone,” said Slanaker of the Red Cross, describing neighbors who would notice if an older resident had not been in contact for a few days.

“When you look at disaster trends from across the country and even globally, communities that have really tight social cohesion or social connection at a neighborhood level actually bounce back faster and are able to mobilize resources quicker than your kind of traditional response agencies.”

On the ground, collaborative efforts have gotten creative. The Red Cross and local government partners are door knocking with heat kits and informational flyers about how to recognize heat illness this year. Tucson has also been running “Heat Lotería” games, a play on the traditional Mexican bingo-esque contest, to teach people about heat illness prevention in council officers and homeless shelters.

As this summer’s temperature hit 100-plus degrees for multiple days, Lafferty has been living in an apartment with the help of federally subsidized housing, which she secured after speaking at City Council about “abominable” treatment of homeless people trying to survive outside.

In the heat of the summer this year, she stays in her air conditioned home and eats a lot of fruit. She also muses on how to stay healthy, given a heart attack she had two years before, also amid the heat of the desert summer. Extreme temperatures can increase risk for people with heart conditions.

“I’m real big on bananas and avocados because they’re high in potassium,” she says. “The lion share of my heart attack was because of low potassium.”

She’s also making sure not to run her air conditioner too high — even as she gets a low-income utility payment subsidy, Lafferty is still paying off an old electric bill from the time she was briefly housed in 2019.

This article first appeared on AZ Luminaria and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

A close reading of Lyudmyla Khersonska’s “When Crimea was still a place of light,“ and the comma doing all the work.

Poem a Day — a recurring look at one poem worth sitting with

Read the title again: “When Crimea was still a place of light,”. Notice what’s missing: a period. Lyudmyla Khersonska ends her title on a comma, and the poem that follows never gives you the rest of the sentence. That comma is the whole argument.

A comma promises continuation. It tells you more is coming, that the thought isn’t finished. Khersonska uses that promise as a trap. The reader waits, instinctively, for the sentence to complete itself, for the “when” to resolve into a “then.”

It never does, because in late February 2014, unmarked Russian soldiers occupied Crimea’s parliament and key government sites, and weeks later, following a referendum the international community does not recognize as legitimate, Russia formally annexed the peninsula.

Those are the missiles the poem is standing just before.

The poem holds you inside a suspended clause for its entire length — gulls, sandals, women in bright dresses — and lets you feel, physically, what it’s like to live inside an unfinished thought. Because that’s what the “before” of an invasion actually is: a sentence that got interrupted and was never allowed to end.

The poem’s central image does the same work in miniature: gulls “free of orders,” sandals beating light “on the border / of water,” and gulls as “the only patrols in the sky” — and there it is, the word that gives away what’s really happening underneath the postcard.

Patrols. Not “flocks.” Not “wheeling overhead.”

Khersonska doesn’t describe the birds; she describes the airspace they occupy, in the vocabulary of the military that will soon replace them. The gulls aren’t decorative. They’re the last thing allowed to move freely through that sky before something else claims it.

Then the poem does something almost cruel with repetition: “women in bright dresses” who “walked barefoot or in cheap sandals, / in sandals, in sandals / instead of boots.”

Say that out loud. The word “sandals” hits three times in four lines, and each repetition strips away a little more of its innocence, until it’s not describing footwear anymore; it’s counting down to the word it’s protecting the poem from saying too soon.

Boots. The soldier’s word, arriving right on schedule, right where the civilian word runs out of places to hide.

And then the line that gives the poem its second title, buried in its own body: “Before missiles, / I, too, loved it all.” Not “I loved it.”

I, too.

That small addition — the “too” — quietly insists that this love wasn’t unique or sentimental. Other people loved it. Everyone loved it. Love for an ordinary place, before it became a battlefield, is not a rare or precious thing. It’s the most common thing in the world, which is exactly why its loss doesn’t need embellishing to register as a catastrophe.

The poem holds the comma open instead, refusing to let the sentence land anywhere safe, asking you to sit inside the “before” a little longer than is comfortable — because for the people who lived it, that’s exactly how long they had to sit there too. That silence around the word “annexation” says more than the word itself would.

Lyudmyla Khersonska is a poet and translator from Odesa, Ukraine, and the author of four poetry collections in Russian, including two published in English translation — most recently Today Is a Different War (Arrowsmith Press, 2023). She was named one of “33 International Women Writers Who Are Bold for Change” by Words Without Borders. This poem appears in English translation by Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris.

This is part of Three Sonorans’ “Poem a Day” series — short, close readings of poems worth sitting with, published as part of our ongoing Substack coverage.

Three Sonorans looks for the places where language carries more history than it first appears to. Here, a Ukrainian poet’s comma becomes a way of remembering Crimea not only as a place invaded, but as a place of gulls, sandals, bright dresses, and ordinary love before missiles arrived. That is the kind of reading we value: slowing down long enough to notice what power, war, and headlines can make us forget.

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The Crux:

Two Tucsonans are dead, but police say the gunman’s plan extended beyond Venture-N: a note reportedly named three more LGBTQ-friendly businesses. This is the story of what happened on Monday, what the numbers say about the climate surrounding it, and how Tucson’s queer community is answering a hit list with open doors rather than fear.

🌵 The Hit List Was Supposed to Spread Fear. Tucson Answered by Showing Up.

by Three Sonorans

Mark Little got up for a glass of water around 12:30 on Monday morning. He lives close enough to Venture-N, the small gay bar on North Sixth Avenue where he works, that the gunshots pulled him out of bed. He told AZPM he looked out toward the parking lot, where strangers were trying to do CPR on the people who had just been shot.

“I know I saw one fellow. He was probably my friend.”

Venture-N was not the whole plan. Police say the gunman, 44-year-old Ousman Ceesay, was carrying a note with the names of multiple LGBTQIA+-associated businesses on it. Sources close to the investigation told KVOA it listed three other LGBTQ-friendly businesses he appeared to be targeting. Mayor Regina Romero said the gunman intended to cause more harm, per The Advocate.

Two men are dead. The note says that number was supposed to be higher.

What We Know — and What We Don’t

The two men killed were Vincent Anthony Siqueiros, 42, and Cameron Davis Capara, 33. This article will not pretend to know who they were. Their stories belong to their families, their friends, their comunidad. Anyone who fills that silence with invention dishonors them. What we owe Vincent and Cameron right now is precision and presence.

According to Tucson police accounts reported by AZCentral, around 12:30 a.m. on Monday, August 31, Ceesay confronted Siqueiros and Capara in the Venture-N parking lot and shot them. Both men died at the scene. Ceesay, wounded, died later at a hospital.

TPD is investigating the killings as a hate crime, and told KOLD it has increased police presence around LGBTQIA+ establishments.

Two things remain genuinely unresolved, and honesty demands we say so:

• How Ceesay was shot. The Tucson Sentinel and 13 News report the wound was self-inflicted; AZCentral reports it is “unclear if Ceesay took his own life,” and AZPM says TPD would not confirm, pending the medical examiner. We will update when the facts firm up.

• Who Ceesay was. KOLD notes he has no apparent criminal record in Pima County and no time in the Arizona state prison system. AZCentral reports attempts to locate a permanent local address were unsuccessful. Anyone with information is asked to call 911 or 88-CRIME.

La Gente Shows Up

By Monday afternoon, before the police tape was even a day old, the parking lot where Vincent and Cameron died had become something else: dozens of Tucsonans with candles and flowers, building a memorial with their hands.

Scott Blades stood in it and told 13 News what Venture-N has meant for decades: “This is a really important community gathering spot, and it’s always been a safe place for people to come.”

And then he said the thing that should be printed on every front page in this state: “We’ll keep finding ways to create that community and find ways to create safety for ourselves and for each other. That’s all we can do.”

That’s all we can do. Build the safety ourselves. Again. While the people with the power to write laws hold hearings.

Colete Barajas knows the long arc: she opened Tucson’s first women’s bar in 1983. She has flown a pride flag outside her Fourth Avenue business since 1995, and when a reporter asked if the gunman’s list made her nervous, she said yes: “I got my flag out there. I got my flag at home.”

And then she refused to move an inch: “I wear this so other people know they are safe around me. My door is wide open. My door will always be wide open. We will not allow fear and guns to keep us behind closed doors.”

The Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation said what needed saying — that places like Venture-N are where people find “friendship, chosen family, safety, and belonging” — and opened its doors to anyone carrying fear or grief.

Vice Mayor Lane Santa Cruz called Venture-N “a small, beloved neighborhood LGBTQ+ bar with a tight-knit community of regulars and friends.”

And Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva carried Vincent and Cameron’s names to the floor of the U.S. House on Monday night, naming what happened a “cold-blooded murder” and demanding the chamber’s first action back be gun safety reform:

“I am sick and tired of Congress refusing to lift a finger to protect our communities... It does not have to be this way.”

It does not have to be this way — and yet the smart money in Washington says the House will answer two dead Tucsonans with a moment of silence, the one legislative tool with a perfect passage rate.

Meanwhile Arizona’s gun laws remain exactly as permissive as the gun lobby wrote them, and the mayor is left telling the Star that “easy access to firearms and Arizona’s weak gun safety laws continue to put all of us at risk.” Increased patrols are welcome — but patrols are downstream math.

They divide response times. They do not subtract the pipeline that wrote the list.

The Math of a Hit List

A note listing three more LGBTQ-friendly businesses is not a grievance. It is an itinerary.

Start there, because the arithmetic matters. Two men are dead. The note says the gunman’s equation had more terms. Whatever stopped him — his own wounds, the speed of a police response that Mark Little called heroic, “they were there in, like, three minutes” — the intended sum was a massacre, not a murder.

Now zoom out one level.

The ACLU is currently tracking 528 anti-LGBTQ bills moving through U.S. state legislatures in 2026. Most will fail. That is not the comfort it sounds like, because the bills that fail still do their work: each one is a public, official declaration that some of our neighbors are debatable. Debatable people become targetable people. That is the feedback loop — rhetoric writes the permission slip, and somebody’s broken son signs it.

Zoom out again.

The FBI’s 2024 hate crime statistics, broken down by GLAAD, count 2,413 single-bias anti-LGBTQ hate crime incidents in one year. Divide that by 365. It comes to roughly seven anti-LGBTQ hate crime incidents reported every single day — and that is only what victims report to police departments that bother to report to Washington. Meanwhile, Williams Institute analysis of FBI data shows hate crime offenses motivated by gender-identity bias climbed from 184 in 2018 to 527 in 2024 — nearly tripled in six years. The trend line has a slope, and the slope is pointed at us.

Pima County Attorney Laura Conover said the shooting appears to be a “tragic and isolated incident.”

She is right about the tragic part, and right that a dead gunman means no prosecution. But:

“Isolated” is doing the work of a sandbag in a monsoon.

You cannot call Monday isolated from a dataset of 2,413. You cannot call it isolated while 528 bills teach the country who is disposable. Ward 6 Councilmember Miranda Schubert, speaking as a queer Tucsonan in whose ward the murders happened, told the Arizona Daily Star what the math looks like from inside it:

“It just shows that we’re living in a political climate that has made it a little bit more permissible to inflict problematic beliefs on other people. I think this is a moment to look for ways to be able to stand together and make ourselves bigger, not shrink in fear.”

Make ourselves bigger, not shrink in fear. Hold that line.

This Didn’t Start Monday Morning

The attack on the gay bar is an American tradition older than the state of Arizona’s conscience. An arsonist burned New Orleans’ UpStairs Lounge in 1973, killing 32 — a police officer told a reporter, “This was, after all, a queer bar.”

No one was ever arrested. It stayed the deadliest attack on LGBTQ people in U.S. history for 43 years, until Pulse, Orlando, 2016, 49 dead, and then Club Q, Colorado Springs, 2022, five murdered.

The root runs deeper than any of those nightclubs.

Long before there was a border to be a battleground, Indigenous nations across this continent held gender and sexuality in far wider hands than the colonizers who arrived carrying binaries and brimstone.

The Indian Health Service’s own account is blunt: Two-Spirit roles were “singled out for condemnation, interference, and many times violence,” driven underground by missionaries and government agents — violence that VCU historians note “often rose to the level of genocide.”

Queerness did not arrive in the borderlands with the bar. It was here before the flag, before the fence, before the slur. On O’odham land, in a valley the Pascua Yaqui also call home, places like Venture-N exist because five centuries of la máquina made everywhere else dangerous — so la gente built their own safety, one barstool, one porch light, one open door at a time.

The sanctuary is not the anomaly. The hatred is the import.

El Camino: What Do You Think?

Here is what the gunman’s note got wrong, mathematically and morally.

Schubert said make ourselves bigger, not shrink in fear. Wednesday is what bigger looks like.

La lista was supposed to be a beginning: three more LGBTQ-friendly businesses, one long night, a body count that would teach a community to hide. Instead it is evidence in an investigation, and the community it targeted is doing the precise opposite of hiding.

On Wednesday, September 2, at 6:30 p.m., Tucson Queerstory is holding a candlelight vigil for Vincent and Cameron at Catalina Park, 41 N. Fourth Ave.

Show up. Bring a candle. Bring a neighbor who thinks this isn’t their fight — it is. If you are struggling, the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation will connect you with someone who can help, and Pima County Victim Services answers at 520-724-5525 during the day and through law enforcement at night.

And then, after Wednesday, comes the longer work: the doors that stay open, the flags that stay up, the friends we check on, the legislature we refuse to let look away.

Colete Barajas has kept her flag flying since 1995, through every cycle of panic and backlash, for one reason: “so other people know they are safe around me.” Multiply that one flag by every porch in this valley and you have the actual equation that defeats a hit list.

The desert has buried better-armed hatreds than this one. Vincent and Cameron should be planning their September, and instead we are planning their vigil. So the least we can do, la gente, is make Wednesday the biggest, warmest, most ungovernable gathering of chosen family this city has ever held.

Descansen en poder, Vincent y Cameron. La puerta sigue abierta — y nosotros la cuidamos.

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Three Sonorans reports from the borderlands where violence rarely arrives without a history behind it. This story looks beyond the Venture-N crime scene to the political rhetoric, legislation, and long history surrounding anti-LGBTQ violence — while keeping its focus on the people who answer fear by keeping their doors open. If this reporting matters to you, share it and help independent Tucson journalism keep naming the pattern.

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The Crux:

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes is calling for a pause on new AI data centers as the state faces mounting pressure on its water and power supplies.

Her warning comes with a striking figure: water demand in the Phoenix area could increase by more than 450% if all planned data centers are built.

by Jerod MacDonald-Evoy, Arizona Mirror

Arizona Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes is calling for a statewide pause on new data centers, specifically those aimed at powering artificial intelligence systems, amid rising energy costs and the federal government’s plan to cut 30% of Arizona’s Colorado River supply.

“The only sane thing to do is to pause the approval of new data centers,” Mayes said in a written statement. “Data centers are power- and water-intensive, and Arizona is challenged on both fronts right now.”

Mayes also said she is planning to hold a town hall in Ahwatukee on Oct. 14 to hear from members of the community about a planned data center project there.

The Menlo Digital hyperscale data center is a 38-acre campus featuring a one-million-square-foot data center planned in the Ahwatukee area. It has been facing criticism from locals.

The company has switched other properties from office space to data centers in other states and has had its data centers purchased by corporations like Amazon for $65 million.

The rapid construction of giant data centers has become a major point of controversy in Arizona and nationwide.

Across the country, politicians and lawmakers are trying to get ahead of the issue, as data center popularity continues to diminish ahead of the midterm elections.

Locally, high-profile data center projects have faced public outlash leading to some of those projects failing to get approval as developers continue to push for the projects.

President Donald Trump has pushed heavily for data centers, as his two sons have invested in the companies behind them.

“Arizona may be one of the most exposed states in the country to the negative impacts of excessive data center development,” Mayes said. “The Colorado River is in serious distress, and Wall Street firms are seeking to ship La Paz County’s groundwater to Phoenix to fuel the Valley’s growth — against the wishes of the county’s residents and leaders. We owe it to our communities, homeowners, and future generations of Arizonans to better manage our water and power needs before any new data center approvals are issued.”

Mayes is calling for state lawmakers and Gov. Katie Hobbs to pass legislation to halt data center approvals until the state has a plan to monitor and control their growth.

Getting legislative approval for such an idea will likely be an uphill battle.

Republican leadership in the Arizona House of Representatives have pushed the past few years for legislation aimed at helping data center power demand by disallowing counties to regulate them and allow the colocation of small modular nuclear reactors, a technology that is largely unproven.

That legislation was ultimately vetoed by Hobbs.

In her announcement, Mayes cited an analysis by the sustainability non-profit Ceres that estimates a more than 450% increase in water demand if all planned data center projects in the greater Phoenix area are built.

Mayes also cited an Arizona State University study that found that data centers can raise nearby neighborhood temperatures by up to four degrees Fahrenheit.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com.

The GIST

South Tucson was almost entirely left off a $4 billion transportation plan until a last-minute $25 million line item saved it. On the same Friday radio hour, a Republican running for Congress a third time told the story of a marijuana conviction that cost him nearly a decade, on a charge the courts later voided. Two very different men, one hour, the same lesson: in the borderlands, if you're not counted, you're erased.

The Count and the Erased: RTA’s $4 Billion Plan and the Candidate Prison Made

A $25 million line almost never made it into a plan now projected at $4 billion. Daniel Butierez Sr. knows what it costs to be left off the list entirely. One Friday hour on who does the counting in the borderlands.

“Right at the very end of the plan, there was a recognition that South Tucson had not been allocated dollars towards their transit function,” Mike Ortega said plainly about a transportation plan Pima County voters had just approved, one that would eventually total roughly $4 billion once leveraged funds were added.

Read that again.

The one-square-mile, working-class, majority-Latino city surrounded by Tucson, the city that provides most of South Tucson’s bus service, was almost left out of the region’s biggest infrastructure investment in a generation. It got written in at the very end, for $25 million.

Almost invisible, even in the plan. South Tucson knows the feeling.

That admission, offered without much drama by the man who runs the agency, is the story of Friday’s Buckmaster Show on KVOI in miniature: in the borderlands, power belongs to whoever does the counting, of ballots, of line items, of pounds and grams, and whoever gets left off the list has to hope somebody notices before it’s final.

The show put two men on opposite ends of that count in the same hour. First, Mike Ortega, executive director of the Regional Transportation Authority, fresh off the March election that approved that 20-year plan, now projected to reach roughly $4 billion with leveraged funds. Then Daniel Butierez Sr., a Republican running for Congress a third time, carrying a story about being miscounted that nobody in that studio saw coming. Tim Steller, the Arizona Daily Star’s metropolitan columnist, co-hosted.

🚌 The Count

Ortega arrived buoyant, and why not: Propositions 418 and 419 both passed, the plan question clearing just over 60 percent. His reading of the results was instant:

“I think that it was a pretty loud and clear mandate from the voter that says, get on it and get these roads addressed as they’re outlined in the plan.”

Loud and clear, if you were one of the 209,533 people who mailed a ballot back in March. Fewer than a third of the county’s 660,275 registered voters bothered to cast one. That’s part of a statewide pattern: off-cycle specials draw barely 27 percent average turnout, 44 points below the November generals they are timed to avoid, and the voter who shows up skews whiter, older, and richer than the communities whose roads are being decided. The math is the machine.

(There was opposition, for what it’s worth: a well-funded campaign backed the plan against a louder but underfunded “no” side, which argued the sales tax is regressive and the plan spends too much on cars.)

South Tucson’s near-miss wasn’t a footnote; it was the biggest surprise of the hour. Steller read the number out loud on air: a $25 million special South Tucson allocation, tucked inside $726 million for transit over 20 years.

Ortega didn’t dress it up: “at the very end of the plan,” someone realized South Tucson, a city Tucson does most of the bus driving for, had been allocated nothing.

The rest is mechanics, but mechanics that matter: $2.6 billion of sales tax plus another $1.2 billion in leveraged funds gets you to roughly $4 billion, spread across 31 road projects. Right now the RTA is just the bank, financing while cities and counties do the building; RTA II lets the agency step in and build directly for members who don’t have the staff to do it themselves.

What la gente forced in shows the same math working in their favor. Pavement preservation, fixing the streets that exist instead of building new ones, “was not in the original RTA nor was it in the plan initially.” Public comment came in so loud the board went back to the statutes and found the authority. Now, Ortega said, Tucson is requesting about $28 million a year for repaving, redesigned to a minimum ten-year life, “because oftentimes the potholes come from the base.” The first RTA II construction project, kicked off August 14, is exactly that: the Irvington Road repaving. The pothole lobby won. Turns out public comment isn’t a suggestion box when everybody screams at once.

The weak spots got a quick hearing.

He’s paid $356,000 a year to say so, and he holds the job because the board fired his predecessor, Farhad Moghimi, on a 5-to-4 vote, a dismissal that’s now a $3.8 million legal claim.

The machine eats its own, too.

The moment that matters most for the borderlands came last. The RTA’s members range from “the city of Tucson, which has a lot of internal capacity,” to “the Tohono O’odham Nation, that doesn’t have necessarily the capacity,” and the agency can now step in with planning, design, right-of-way acquisition, and construction management. And then the line every Native Nation listening should clip and save:

On a desert where O’odham land was split by a border drawn without asking the Nation, a regional builder with no power to take land is a different relationship than the one history wrote. Hold them to it.

A $25 million line item almost didn’t survive to the final draft of a budget. And a decade of a man’s life didn’t survive a drug charge that never held up in court either, until someone finally looked twice.

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⛓️ The Erased Man’s File

The night after he lost a race for Congress for the second time, with a third campaign already taking shape, Daniel Butierez Sr. took his wife, “very depressed,” he admitted, to Casino Del Sol, the Pascua Yaqui Nation’s resort out on West Valencia Road.

They were walking across the casino floor when a couple stopped him: We can’t wait to vote for you. His answer ought to hang over the door of every elections office in Arizona:

He kept meeting people, he said, who never knew there was a special election at all: the one that sent Adelita Grijalva to Congress with 68.9 percent of the vote while barely one in five of the district’s roughly 480,000 registered voters cast a ballot. Butierez sat down with Buckmaster two nights after debating Grijalva in Scottsdale, at the tail end of a rough season that saw his campaign signs vandalized and stolen, and the first thing to know about him isn’t his party. It’s his file.

In 1991, police came for Daniel Butierez over one joint, 1.3 grams by his own account, and really for his cousin, who was on probation. They wanted him to testify. He told them no. So he found himself on trial for offering to sell more than eight pounds of marijuana, which he says never happened; one officer, by his telling, testified and lied, while another told the court he seemed like a nice kid.

The court record backs the collapse: a jury convicted him in 1992, but the trial court ruled at sentencing that the eight pounds were never proven, cut the conviction to a lesser offense, and gave probation. When his probation was revoked in 1994, the machine gave him ten years. Three of them in maximum security, cellmates who were murderers. He came out to find his children gone, the mother of his children gone, everything he owned gone, and he went back once more before he hit bottom. On Friday, he said it plainly:

“I did a total of nine and a half years… most of these men that are in there never had that foundation like I have.”

Judge Jeffrey T. Bergin later agreed the judgment was void; in Butierez’s framing, “there was never a conviction in the first place.” Sit with the math of that. One joint, turned into a decade behind bars by the drug war’s machinery, and the state admitted it decades later with no remedy attached. No check, no apology, just a corrected file. That is what erasure looks like when it gets reversed: paperwork. Whatever you think of his politics, the man asking for your vote in CD7 was built by the same carceral assembly line la gente have been naming for fifty years. He just lived it from the inside.

What he built from it is the interesting part.

He talks up DTAP, Drug Treatment Alternative to Prison, which a viewer messaged him about two weeks before the show: “It’s very successful. But they haven’t expanded it, and I don’t know why.” Here’s what he may not know: DTAP is the Pima County Attorney’s own program, running since 2011, with a success rate of around 70 percent at less than half the cost of prison, and is currently administered by Laura Conover’s office.

The Republican’s favorite policy idea is a Democratic county attorney’s program. The borderlands make strange compañeros.

His own plan goes further: help people leaving addiction buy a small apartment for something like $10,000, sell it back when they’re ready to move up, and walk toward a house with a down payment and some dignity. “My program is to help them give them back their self-esteem so that they can get their lives back.”

Then the heresies, stacked.

He says the debate’s biggest disagreement was education, not immigration: “I don’t think we disagreed on immigration really.”

She is a strong advocate of public education; he is a strong advocate for charter and private schools. On immigration, he challenged her to get behind the Dignity Act, H.R. 4393, the Salazar-Escobar bill that would legalize long-term undocumented residents and open a pathway for Dreamers; he’s right that it carries exactly 20 Republican and 20 Democratic cosponsors, and right that Grijalva isn’t on the original list. His debate closer was pure contractor: “If there’s other things you want done that I’m not willing to do, then fire me and hire somebody else, but let me go in and fix the things I can.”

Asked about Trump’s supply-side drug war, the boat strikes and the leverage games, the Republican nominee answered:

“He said he was gonna put all this money into it… I haven’t seen all this money getting put into it. I see nothing really working with it.”

At the debate, he defended mail-in voting against his own president’s push. His only endorsement is AZCOPS, the statewide police association, and he says he’s never asked Trump for anything. The Trump endorsement, he says, arrived unrequested in 2024, when he took his wife to meet the man and tried to get her hat signed:

“He goes, well, you know what? You have my endorsement. And I thought, oh my God. I was trying to get her hat signed.”

The most valuable thing a Republican can own in 2026, handed out like a wristband at a meet-and-greet, to a candidate who can’t use it in a district this Democratic and doesn’t seem to want it anyway.

And still, Buckmaster’s opening question hangs over all of it. He lost by 27 points in November 2024, 63.4 to 36.6 percent, when everyone knew there was an election, and by 40 in a special when few did, with $208,165 raised this cycle to test the calendar theory once more. The calendar explains one of those losses. The other one is the message.

Buckmaster, who worked the AP desk inside the Arizona Republic building in 1973, remembered dining with Don Bolles, the investigative reporter murdered by a car bomb on June 2, 1976, while chasing a story. Arizona marked its 50th anniversary this June; Steller, across the studio, holds the award that bears Bolles’ name. Keeping the count honest is the same job it always was.

¿Qué Piensas Tú? What Do You Think?

Here’s the hope, and it’s specific: one of the largest public investments this region has ever approved now includes pavement preservation and a $25 million line for South Tucson, and both exist only because la gente’s public comments were too loud to file away.

The agency spending it can build for the Tohono O’odham Nation but cannot condemn a single inch of anybody’s land. And a man the system erased for a decade is on the ballot, reading the machine its own file. La máquina bends. Friday’s hour proved it bends toward whoever shows up, speaks up, and mails the ballot back.

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Three Sonorans follows the numbers that powerful institutions would prefer you not examine too closely — the ballots that were cast, the communities almost left off the plan, the years taken from a person’s life, and the public comments that forced the machinery to bend. This story is what borderlands journalism looks like when we put those numbers in the same frame and ask who benefits from the count.

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La elección que nadie conoció nos costó más que un asiento. Preséntense.

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The GIST

Arizona just got a smaller Colorado River cut than feared. But the reprieve does not solve the deeper problem: the same politics that strain the river are also feeding voucher abuse, subsidizing data centers, militarizing the border, and leaving families to absorb the costs.

Katie Hobbs’ latest interview puts all of those contradictions on the table.

📊 Breaking Down Hobbs' Press Room Interview: Water Cuts, Voucher Chaos, and the Limits of Competent Management

by Three Sonorans

Halfway through a question about Colorado River anxiety, Katie Hobbs stopped and said she had breaking news. “I’m gonna break some news right here,” the governor told AZPM’s Tony Perkins on the Aug. 28 edition of The Press Room, “because we actually just got that decision from the federal government minutes ago.”

Hobbs said Arizona had received word from the federal government minutes earlier about the next two years of Colorado River operations, and she had to answer for it live, on camera.

That moment exposed where power actually sits: Washington decides Arizona’s water future, not Phoenix. Hobbs spent the rest of the hour making her case for a second term — water, the border, data centers, schools, affordability — while University of Arizona political scientist Samara Klar later assessed the race against Republican nominee Andy Biggs.

The tension running beneath it was not subtle: Hobbs wants to present herself as a practical governor managing crises, while the crises themselves, from ICE enforcement to Colorado River scarcity, are products of systems that do not become humane simply because a governor administers them more competently.

Water: Arizona wins a reprieve, not a future. Arizona will lose roughly 31 percent of its Colorado River allocation over the next two years — a real hit, but far short of the 77 percent cut to the Central Arizona Project’s water supply that the federal government had been weighing.

“There are cuts, but they are far, far less than what was originally proposed from the federal government.”

The mechanics: the Bureau of Reclamation issued a Record of Decision on Aug. 21, establishing a broader 2027–2036 framework and the first operating guidelines for 2027–28. The old arrangements governing Lake Powell and Lake Mead were set to expire at the end of 2026, forcing the basin states into a fight over who absorbs a river’s long-overdrawn limits.

Hobbs also called for the Upper Basin states — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico, which sit closer to the river’s headwaters — to bear meaningful conservation obligations rather than leaving the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada to do the arithmetic alone.

That is not a technical dispute. It is a power dispute dressed up in acre-feet.

For Tucson and the rest of Southern Arizona, the community that absorbs the next cut is rarely the most powerful water user. It is more likely to be a rural community, a small farmer, a groundwater-dependent neighborhood, or a household that cannot simply purchase resilience.

Still, Hobbs has made Colorado River policy a central political argument rather than an obscure administrative file. Water is no longer a future problem in Arizona; it is the ledger beneath every housing promise, semiconductor plant, subdivision, and data-center proposal.

The voucher machine keeps eating schools

Only six cases have been referred for prosecution out of roughly 18,000 ESA parents the state has flagged for misusing public voucher money, according to a 12News investigation.

Hobbs was clearest, and angriest, when the conversation turned to Arizona’s universal Empowerment Scholarship Account program. The program began in 2011 as a mechanism for some students with disabilities, then expanded to military families, additional categories of students, and eventually nearly every Arizona student. Its universal form has become a public-money pipeline with inadequate oversight.

“The biggest issue really is the out-of-control ESA program.”

She cited reporting on purchases that had no plausible educational purpose. Investigative reporting found nearly 84,000 ESA purchases flagged as unallowed between December 2024 and October 2025, including lingerie, gaming consoles, diamond jewelry, jet-ski rentals, designer purses, hotel rooms, and other items that do not belong on the public’s school tab.

This is the structural pattern: austerity for public classrooms, discretion for privatized alternatives. Arizona lawmakers repeatedly tell public schools to do more with less, then act surprised when a universal voucher system with weak guardrails becomes a marketplace for vendors and a jackpot for people willing to exploit the rules.

The people resisting this voucher machine are not abstractions. They are organizers like Beth Lewis of Save Our Schools Arizona and classroom teachers led by AEA President Marisol Garcia demanding fully funded neighborhood schools; parents of disabled students like Kathy Boltz and advocates at Disability Rights Arizona warning that universal expansion stripped special-needs kids of federal protections while subsidizing luxury vendors; and investigative reporters who followed the receipts while Capitol politicians called it “parental choice.”

Hobbs said she would seek income limits and stronger guardrails, and she faulted Superintendent Tom Horne for failing to adequately police expenditures. That critique is valid. But the larger truth is that the ESA program is operating exactly as broad privatization schemes tend to operate: privatize public funds, dilute accountability, and call the resulting mess freedom.

The border is not a campaign backdrop

Hobbs began that part of the conversation with the language every Arizona governor is expected to carry into an election: border security, drug interdiction, law enforcement support, cartel disruption.

She said her administration had administered more than $200 million to local law-enforcement agencies, deployed the National Guard for drug interdiction, and launched Operation Desert Guardian. (Those administered funds are separate from the $902 million in border-security costs the state is requesting reimbursement for from the federal government. Roughly $192 million of that request covers local law enforcement.)

But the sharper part of her answer came when Perkins asked about detention centers and the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement. Hobbs rejected the premise that militarized spectacle equals safety.

“The Trump administration’s approach to immigration enforcement is not being handled in a way that’s keeping us safe. It’s being handled in a way that is designed for splashy headlines.”

That matters in Southern Arizona because the borderlands are not an empty political prop where candidates can stage boots, walls, drones, and helicopters for a cable-news audience.

People live here. Families work here. Pascua Yaqui and Tohono O’odham people move through lands and communities that long predate the fence, the checkpoints, and the federal agencies that now presume the right to interrogate them.

Hobbs specifically warned that immigration agents have swept up U.S. citizens, people with lawful status, DREAMers, longtime residents, and Indigenous people able to document citizenship in their Nations. Her point is consistent with the basic problem of mass-enforcement systems: when the operating incentive is volume, the human beings caught in the dragnet become paperwork errors until they can prove otherwise. Qué convenient for a government that calls itself efficient.

The historical root predates the Trump administration. The contemporary enforcement regime grew out of the border militarization of the 1990s during the Clinton Administration, when federal strategy funneled migration into more lethal desert corridors while turning border communities into laboratories for surveillance and detention.

The machinery did not begin with Trump. He has simply made its cruelty more theatrical.

Klar put the electoral contradiction plainly. Immigration politics, she argued, has shifted from a dominant concern about unauthorized crossings and border security in 2022 toward concern over “over-enforcement” and ICE tactics in 2026.

“Now we have a bit of a different issue when people talk about immigration. And that tends to be a concern with over-enforcement with tactics used by ICE.”

That is the knot Hobbs is trying to untie: affirming enforcement while arguing that federal enforcement has become indiscriminate and dangerous. For borderlands communities, the question is more fundamental. Safety cannot mean giving armed institutions broader permission to terrorize the very people they claim to protect.

Data centers want the water, power — and a tax break

Perkins reminded Hobbs that she had already acknowledged in her State of the State address that, as a legislator in 2013, she supported the tax exemption designed to attract data centers.

In 2026, she asked the legislature to eliminate it outright, but the Republican-controlled body refused to cancel incentives already promised to existing projects. The three-year moratorium that emerged from budget negotiations was the compromise she settled for. Arizona’s pause runs from July 1, 2026, through June 30, 2029.

Hobbs conceded what neighbors of these facilities already knew: the power bill, the water table, and who ends up paying for both.

“We have to make sure they’re paying for themselves, that they’re not overusing water or energy, and that we’re addressing community concerns.”

That sentence should be a floor, not a ceiling.

The pause was a concession to years of public concern, but it was not a full reckoning. Before the moratorium took effect, developers filed 113 applications in roughly two weeks; nearly as many as the 123 applications the Arizona Commerce Authority had received in the previous 13 years.

The market has spoken, apparently in the ancient dialect of “get the subsidy before midnight.”

Hobbs framed data centers as part of an unavoidable high-tech economy, while insisting their location and impacts must be managed. That is more honest than the boosterism that treats every server farm as a civic blessing.

But a sustainable development policy cannot merely ask whether a project creates jobs or expands the tax base. It must ask who receives the benefits, who carries the water and power burden, and whether communities have real authority to say no. The freeze itself has already redirected real money: Hobbs’ administration says the three-year pause saves the state roughly $57 million, funds her office is now steering toward childcare, rural hospitals, and food assistance.

That is a modest sum, given that the Arizona Department of Revenue’s Tax Expenditure Report recorded the exemption’s cost at $38.5 million in fiscal year 2025 alone, with the Grand Canyon Institute projecting it would reach at least $60 million by fiscal year 2027. The two-week application sprint had locked most of the pipeline into the old subsidy before the door closed.

Affordability cannot be a rebate-only state

Hobbs highlighted two concrete affordability actions: medical-debt relief and federal investment in rural health care.

Her greatest accomplishment is the medical debt initiative. Earlier this month, the governor’s office announced that more than $1 billion in medical debt had been erased for more than 670,000 Arizonans through the state’s partnership with Undue Medical Debt. The initiative uses public money to buy qualifying debt at a fraction of its face value and cancel it, a reminder that much of the “debt” strangling families is an accounting asset sold and resold by institutions that already extracted their pound of flesh.

“We’ve erased over a billion dollars of medical debt for over 600,000 Arizonans.”

That relief is real. It can mean a family’s credit stops bleeding, a survivor of illness stops dodging collectors, or a worker can finally imagine saving instead of servicing an old emergency. But it also reveals the cruelty of the underlying system: medical debt exists because health care in the United States remains a market transaction before it becomes care.

Hobbs also cited a first-year federal award of roughly $167 million through Arizona’s Rural Health Transformation Program, meant to soften, not replace, the impact of federal Medicaid cuts on rural hospitals and clinics. A rebate helps.

A debt cancellation helps. A grant helps. But none of them fixes a political economy that produces the same emergency, at scale, every year.

What Do You Think?

No miracle was promised at the AZPM table. Hobbs described a state trying to hold together under federal immigration crackdowns, a shrinking Colorado River, privatization’s appetite for school dollars, and an affordability crisis that punishes people for being sick, housed, or alive.

But something useful surfaced: the record shows that public pressure can move la máquina, from ESA scrutiny to data-center reckoning to water visibility, and it refuses to let ICE’s cruelty pass as public safety.

1. Should Arizona extend the data-center tax-break moratorium permanently — and require meaningful community consent, water accounting, and power-cost protections before approving future projects?

2. What safeguards would actually stop ESA funds from being diverted from public education, and should Arizona end universal vouchers altogether?

3. Can a governor credibly balance border enforcement with resistance to ICE abuses, or does the enforcement model itself have to change?

The desert has always taught a harder lesson than campaign season: there is no such thing as limitless extraction, whether the resource is river water, public-school money, hospital care, or a family’s fear. Justice looks like a state in which the people who keep the place alive get to decide what the future holds.

Aquí seguimos, y aquí mandamos.

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Three Sonorans is an independent Substack rooted in Tucson and the borderlands, where we read the fine print on every water deal, voucher ledger, and tax break they swore would trickle down. The river’s overdrawn, la máquina’s hungry, and nobody’s coming to audit it for us. If this piece moved you, share it — that’s how the word spreads when the watchdogs get muzzled. Aquí seguimos.

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🥤 Drink America Dry: For Some Reason, the Data Centers Are Promoting This Ad Campaign

By La Cebolla Staff | Three Sonorans Satire Department

The launch ceremony for “America Dry” was held in Rio Verde Foothills. Attendees were asked not to drink anything, out of respect for neighbors who still haul their water by truck.

La Cebolla checked. This is real. (It is not a bit. We wish it were.)

Doña Chela, watching it on the little TV behind the register at the panadería on South 12th, did not look up from her coffee. “Le pusieron nombre nuevo al agua,” she said, to no one in particular. “Ya, ya.”

She did not mean the soda. Neither did anyone else, really.

The Sponsors

The rebrand — Canada Dry becomes America Dry, part of the same federal mood that renamed the Gulf of Mexico — arrives with a $600 million ad campaign. It is funded, for some reason, by a consortium of Arizona data-center developers.

“America Dry is more than a beverage,” said HyperCloud Southwest spokesman Kerry Sylvana. “It represents the confidence to use resources without apologizing. HyperCloud is proud to stand behind a brand sharing our values and our regional water infrastructure, which we currently lease.”

AMERICA DRY.
THE FUTURE IS THIRSTY.

(Nobody at HyperCloud has explained what a cloud company gets out of a ginger ale. La Cebolla has a theory. It rhymes with “cooling.”)

What the Ceremony Was Actually Celebrating

An economic-development official was admirably direct about it: “A data center is really an investment in water infrastructure — specifically, infrastructure that moves water from wherever it is to wherever the servers are.” He stressed that this water would be consumed domestically, unlike the state’s alfalfa.

The state’s alfalfa, for the record, is not.

A Saudi-owned farming company called Fondomonte has spent over a decade pumping unregulated groundwater from La Paz County — 64,000 gallons a minute, from wells nobody was tracking until this year — to grow hay that gets shipped overseas. The crop is banned back home in Saudi Arabia. For using too much water.

(La Cebolla did not invent this. La Cebolla wishes it had, because it would mean this was funny instead of just true.)

This is what “cannot be disclosed, because it would confuse residents” means. The water’s already spoken for. Telling you would just make the math visible.

The Closing Sermon

El Místico, informed of the ceremony and the 64,000 gallons a minute, held up his Lotería deck to El Diablito and said nothing. The neighborhood has learned to treat his silence as a full paragraph.

Doña Chela turned the TV off before the second ad — the one with the kid filling a glass at the kitchen tap — could finish.

“Ya sé cómo termina,” she said.

She did not mean the commercial.

Dry indeed. (It is not a metaphor. It’s just also a metaphor.)

La Cebolla is a satirical publication. Any resemblance to actual federal beverage policy, actual groundwater law, or actual Saudi-owned alfalfa operations is the country’s problem, not ours — though the alfalfa part, we should note, is not satire at all.

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🧅 La Cebolla es una publicación satírica de Three Sonorans — Noticias de la Resistencia Fronteriza. Our sponsors just renamed water a “regional infrastructure investment.” It’s currently being pumped out at 64,000 gallons per minute to grow hay for Saudi cows. Suscríbete.

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Poem a Day — a recurring look at one poem worth sitting with.

A man stands with his feet on the ground and looks up at the sky. That’s the whole poem. And somehow William Carlos Williams packs into it a question most of us spend our lives avoiding: when you pick yourself back up after something falls apart, how do you know you’re actually recovering, and not just going numb?

“Thursday” opens with a confession so plain it almost slides past you: “I have had my dream—like others— / and it has come to nothing.”

No melodrama, no self-pity spelled out. Just a flat statement of failure, softened only by “like others” — a small, generous admission that this isn’t a special kind of disappointment. Everyone’s dream comes to nothing eventually. This one just happens to be his, and it happens to be today.

What happens next is the whole poem’s argument, and it turns on a single word. The speaker says he remains “carelessly / with feet planted on the ground.”

Read one way, that’s relief — the dream’s weight has been set down, and he’s standing loose, unburdened, present.

Read another way, it’s colder: care-less, a man going numb so the disappointment can’t reach him. Williams never tells you which one it is. He just gives you the word and lets both readings sit there at once, the way an actual bad day rarely announces itself as one thing or the other.

Instead of resolving that ambiguity, the poem does something stranger: it starts cataloging the body. “...feeling my clothes about me, / the weight of my body in my shoes, / the rim of my hat, air passing in and out / at my nose.”

Nothing symbolic. Nothing profound. Clothes, weight, a hat brim, breath. It’s the kind of inventory a person takes when they’re not sure, yet, what they’re feeling — reaching for whatever is concrete and countable because the emotional truth won’t hold still.

That’s the poem’s real subject. Not the failed dream — Williams barely tells you anything about it — but the exact, unnamed state a person enters right after. Grounded or shut down. Recovering or retreating. The body doesn’t know the difference between the two, and for the length of this poem, neither do we.

One sentence, no exit

Structurally, “Thursday” is a single unbroken sentence from first word to last, with no stanza breaks. That’s the point, not a flourish: it makes you experience the poem’s shift the way the speaker does — continuously, with no clean edge separating before from after. By the time you reach the last line, “and decide to dream no more,” you’ve been carried through the whole arc in one motion.

Not in stages. In one long exhale.

Williams doesn’t resolve the ambiguity he sets up, and that refusal is the most honest thing about the poem. Some days, standing with your feet on the ground and deciding to stop dreaming is exactly the same motion as giving up. “Thursday” doesn’t ask you to tell the difference. It just asks you to notice that you can’t.

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) was a physician and one of the central figures of American Modernist poetry, best known for his commitment to the plain, unadorned American idiom — the belief, in his own words, that there are “no ideas but in things.” His major works include “Paterson,” his book-length modernist epic, and the widely anthologized short poem “The Red Wheelbarrow.” He practiced medicine in Rutherford, New Jersey, for most of his life while writing in the hours around it.

This is part of Three Sonorans’ “Poem a Day” series — short, close readings of poems worth sitting with, published as part of our ongoing Substack coverage.

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by Eileen Mamaghani and Ellis Preston, Cronkite News

WASHINGTON – The recent incursion by masked federal agents on Tohono O’odham land didn’t just anger that tribe, which has been trying to block border wall construction along the remote stretch it controls in Arizona.

It also infuriated Native Americans who had higher hopes for Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, the former Oklahoma senator who is only the second Indigenous cabinet member ever.

“This is especially disappointing when the DHS is headed by … a member of the Cherokee Nation,” said Angelique EagleWoman, director of the Native American Law and Sovereignty Institute at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in Minnesota.

Agents from Customs and Border Protection and the Bureau of Indian Affairs entered the Tohono O’odham Nation at 4 a.m. on Tuesday to prevent tribal authorities from blocking contractors, according to a statement issued that day by the Nation.

Jason Nichols, like Mullin a member of the Cherokee Nation, called the incursion by masked agents a “step backward” in federal-tribal relations – and surprising, given Mullin’s “knowledge on the importance of tribal sovereignty.”

The former mayor of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, was Mullin’s Democratic opponent in 2018 when he won a U.S. House seat. He was dubious about Mullin’s preparation for the homeland security post, he said, but had been relatively impressed with his performance on border policy until this incident.

“What I’m hoping for is that they take a deep breath, you know, take one step back,” Nichols said, referring to Mullin’s department. He called for “substantive consultation with the tribe, because I do think the tribes have proven to be willing and even eager partners.”

Indeed, the Tohono O’odham have long cooperated with the federal government on border security, though the Nation has also strongly opposed wall construction. One all-Native American unit of Immigration and Customs Enforcement called the Shadow Wolves patrols the Sonoran desert from its base on the Nation.

The Tohono O’odham has members and communities on both sides. Its land spans 62 miles of the border west of Nogales.

In April, a DHS contractor partly destroyed a sacred archaeological site. The Tohono O’odham filed a lawsuit in June to block further construction and in early August it posted “no trespassing” signs. But on Aug. 14, a federal judge in Washington rejected its request for a temporary pause, despite pleas that construction threatens many other sacred sites.

DHS defended the ongoing construction, though officials deflected questions about the use of force to keep tribal authorities at bay.

“The project will close one of the most dangerous smuggling and trafficking corridors on the Southwest border: remote desert that has facilitated decades of drug loads, migrant deaths, and cartel activity,” CBP commissioner Rodney Scott said in a statement his office provided to Cronkite News. “Congress funded this work, a Federal court has affirmed it, and CBP is carrying it out under the legal authorities that apply.”

According to the Tohono O’odham Nation, contractors engaged in “pre-construction activities” with drilling equipment at three locations. CBP and BIA agents and a SWAT team used a vehicle blockade to prevent their removal by tribal police, who could only monitor the activity from a distance, according to the tribe.

EagleWoman said “the trespassing and covert-style operations” likely violated internal DHS protocols.

Meghan Bishop, director of policy of the National Congress of American Indians, or NCAI, said federal authorities had plenty of better options.

“I don’t think any tribal nation wants to ban people from their lands, but as sovereigns they have the ability and capability to do that,” she said, “The federal government should respect that.”

“From everything that I have seen and understand, the Department of Homeland Security has not engaged in a collaborative, consultative, good fair manner with the nation,” Bishop said.

Another Oklahoman, Joe Deere, a tribal councilor of the Cherokee Nation, also criticized DHS for ignoring the tribe’s objections.

“They have violated treaties before, and they are overstepping the tribal consultation,” said Deere, also a regional vice president at NCAI. “Tribal sovereignty should come first, no matter what protection of the people.”

Aaron Wright, a preservation anthropologist with Archaeology Southwest who advises tribes, noted that Mullin’s experience in Oklahoma is very different from that of someone who grew up on a Nation that spans an international border.

“Obviously, the Cherokee Nation does not share a border with Mexico, and I suspect that there aren’t many, if any, enrolled Cherokee members who live in Mexico and cross that border to visit family and relatives on a semi-regular basis,” he said.

Delvina Charley, an Indigenous activist in Arizona and member of the Navajo Nation, called Mullin a “sellout” who cannot be trusted by fellow Native Americans.

“If this was someone else’s backyard – in Paradise Valley, at the White House – this would be handled differently,” she said.

This article first appeared on Cronkite News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

by Stephanie Casanova, AZ Luminaria

Standing near the pond at Quitobaquito Springs, Lorraine Marquez Eiler, a Hia-Ced O’odham elder, shared how her ancestors held ceremonies at the sacred site — a desert oasis in a national park that the federal government is set to bulldoze for a new border wall.

She pulled out a photo of her great-great-grandparents and her great-grandparents, who would walk about 50 miles through the Sonoran Desert to the springs. The O’odham call the water flow A’al Vaipia. She showed the image of her ancestors to a group that included Indigenous leaders and a U.S. congressional representative — all there on Monday to condemn the border wall construction.

“All of my lifetime of work has been for the memories of my ancestors, of what they went through. With the incoming wall, should it be disrupted?” Marquez Eiler said in a determined voice, speaking of her ancestral lands. “That’s just another slap in the face, as far as I’m concerned, to my ancestors. And so I ask: Why?”

Surrounded by more than 100 community members at a town hall that followed the visit to Quitobaquito, Marquez Eiler hoped the federal government would pause border construction, as it did earlier this month in Texas after public backlash.

Quitobaquito is sacred to the Hia-Ced O’odham, the Tohono O’odham and other Indigenous people in Southern Arizona and México, who have traveled to the site for generations to join religious pilgrimages and ceremonies. They fear the spring is at risk of drying up if another border wall is built on the protected lands about 30 miles east of Tohono O’odham Nation.

The Nation is now fighting to halt border construction on two fronts: On O’odham land, where the federal government plans to build a new 30-foot border wall; and on adjacent federal land where another new border fence threatens Quitobaquito.

The projects are part of the Trump administration’s push to spend nearly $50 billion in taxpayer funds on border wall construction.

This is far from tribal citizens’ first fight with the U.S. government over destruction and division of their sovereign tribal lands. From the beginning, people of Tohono O’odham Nation have lived on lands that had no borders.

When the U.S. and México governments agreed to separate territories, the Tribal Nation wasn’t informed.

For years and until today, O’odham citizens — on both sides of a border they never agreed to — travel freely across their nation. While they have tried to work with border officials to quell crime, they have fought border walls that separate their people and harm their ancestral lands.

The recent fights under the Trump administration have spurred a legal battle and a high-profile standoff between federal agents and law enforcement from the Tohono O’odham Nation. O’odham people are now fighting for Tribal sovereignty in the face of a Republican-led federal government arguing for U.S. sovereignty.

Feds already razing the land

In the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, where Quitobaquito Springs sits about 13 miles west of the Lukeville border port of entry, the Trump administration has proposed a 30-foot tall border fence 150 feet from the existing one. Marquez Eiler is worried she will no longer be able to access land that for generations has been part of her Tribal Nation’s religious traditions, if that wall is built.

Parts of Quitobaquito lands originally belonged to a family of Hia-Ced O’odham descent. In 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt signed a proclamation establishing the Organ Pipe National Monument as a way to preserve a vast swath of the Sonoran Desert. The new monument was part of a U.S. National Park Service effort to preserve “ecological wonders of the country,” the agency’s website states.

Now, a few miles east of the pond, construction equipment from federal government contractors sits next to the border, the land around it already cleared. Cactuses along the border are marked with a colored string, and a rope lines the proposed area where a second border wall may be built.

If that line continues west, the Quitobaquito pond is right in its path. If contractors bulldoze the cacti, they will destroy legally protected desert plants. They will destroy flora that is sacred to the O’ohdam people, who traditionally believe that plants and the earth are their ancestors.

When the U.S.-México boundary was created through the 1854 Gadsden Purchase, it divided the Tohono O’odham Nation’s ancestral lands. Today, there are about 3,000 enrolled O’odham citizens living in Sonora, México, and families often cross the border to visit family, visit cultural sites, and for religious ceremonies.

Tohono O’odham Nation sues federal government

About 30 miles east of Quitobaquito — on O’odham land — the administration has also proposed building a 30-foot fence in three areas where the border is currently marked by heavy steel fencing a few feet tall.

In June, the Tohono O’odham Nation filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security in an attempt to block border wall construction on their land.

“While the Nation values its close relationship with the Department, it has long opposed construction of a border wall on the Reservation,” the lawsuit states.

“The Nation understands that construction of the wall would entail significant devastation on the Reservation, including the destruction of mountain peaks sacred to the O’odham,” the suit argues. “It would fray the ties between O’odham communities and families on opposite sides of the border, interfere significantly with O’odham religious rituals and practices, and destroy plant and animal resources sacred to the O’odham.”

The Nation’s lawsuit cited instances earlier in the year when federal contractors “destroyed ancestral sites of great importance while constructing the wall” adjacent to O’odham land.

In April, a Department of Homeland Security contractor damaged the Las Playas Intaglio, a 1,000-year-old fish-shaped geoglyph in Arizona’s Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge that pointed toward the Gulf of California.

Border Patrol continues construction

In a memorandum outlining opposition to the lawsuit, the federal government’s attorneys said the Tohono O’odham Nation failed to show that the border wall construction is being done in excess of the federal government’s legal authority. The document also emphasized the U.S. government’s “preexisting right to secure the border.”

“While the United States has worked — and will continue to work — cooperatively with Plaintiff to promote their shared interest in border security, Plaintiff does not hold veto power over the United States’ sovereign duty to secure its borders,” the memo said.

While waiting for a decision from the courts, tribal leaders put up “No Trespassing” signs on Aug. 7, saying in a news release that border wall contractors who attempted to enter the Tohono O’odham Nation would be “illegally trespassing.” Early Tuesday morning, contractors entered the Nation accompanied by about 20 “masked, armed” border patrol agents, according to a news release from the Tohono O’odham Nation.

In an emailed statement Thursday to Arizona Luminaria, Rodney Scott, U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner, said CBP is moving forward with the federal government’s border wall construction project along the 62 miles that cut through the Tohono O’odham Nation.

“The project will close one of the most dangerous smuggling and trafficking corridors on the Southwest border: remote desert that has facilitated decades of drug loads, migrant deaths, and cartel activity,” Scott wrote.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson in the same email said, “the worksites are inside the 60-foot Roosevelt Reservation,” referring to designated land north of the U.S.-México border that the federal government manages.

“This is about tribal sovereignty”

At Quitobaquito Springs, Marquez Eiler, the tribal elder, led U.S. Rep. Adelita Grijalva toward the pond to share more with the congresswoman about the tribal communities’ fight.

“After standing here today, seeing this land, and directly hearing from the nation, I am more convinced than ever, this is not just a border construction project,” Grijalva said. “This is about tribal sovereignty, it’s about sacred land, it’s about history, culture and spiritual practices of the O’odham people and others.”

Tohono O’odham Chairman Verlon Jose and Vice Chairwoman Carla Johnson organized the trip to Quitobaquito to stand against the Trump administration’s insistence on building a new border wall.

For the Tohono O’odham and other Indigenous people, the land is their church, where they hold ceremony and prayer, Jose said. The federal government has a history of destroying the O’odham’s sacred land, he added.

When the first border fence went up between 2019 and 2020, contractors blasted through O’odham burial sites on Monument Hill.

“This is not ours to own. It is ours to protect, to protect for the people. To protect for you and I and everyone the creator has placed here on this earth,” Jose said.

“Why do we not want a wall?”

A few hours after their visit to Quitobaquito on Monday, the International Sonoran Desert Alliance, which Marquez Eiler co-founded, hosted a town hall in Ajo, about 40 miles north of the springs. Grijalva, Jose and Johnson shared their efforts to stop the construction projects and listened to residents’ concerns.

More than 100 people filled the Ajo Plaza Rec Hall.

They shared worries over whether the wildlife would survive another construction project – the Quitobaquito pupfish, an endangered species, the Sonoyta mud turtle, the desert caper plant and the Quitobaquito tryonia, a tiny springsnail, call the springs their home.

They criticized the taxpayer cost for the border fence as too high – more than $46 billion in federal funding for projects from California to Texas. They urged Grijalva to push for comprehensive, humane immigration reform instead.

“Why do we not want a wall? Because we are not afraid of who is on the other side,” said Sara Mae Williams, Justice of the Peace in Ajo and a citizen of the Tohono O’odham Nation. “It’s us. It’s our people. It pains me when they try to divide us.”

On Tuesday, Grijalva and other Democratic federal lawmakers who represent the borderlands – Reps. Veronica Escobar of Texas and Raul Ruiz and Juan Vargas of California – sent a letter opposing the wall to the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of the Interior.

The lawmakers urged the Trump administration to stop further construction of the border wall “until meaningful government-to-government consultation has occurred with the Tohono O’odham Nation and Congress has received a full accounting of the project’s impacts on Tribal lands, cultural resources, and surrounding communities.”

The fight continues

U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon denied the Nation’s motion for a preliminary injunction on Aug. 14. In a written opinion explaining his decision, the judge said the Tohono O’odham Nation is “unlikely to succeed on the merits because the federal Roosevelt Reservation exists along the international border and, in any event, plaintiff has not established that construction of a border wall will indeed alter Reservation boundaries.”

“The international border is an area of great significance to both the United States and to the Nation,” Leon wrote. “While I have concluded that a preliminary injunction is unwarranted, I fully expect the Government in the months ahead to follow through on its guarantees of consultation and cooperation with the Nation to address the Nation’s concerns regarding border wall construction!”

The Tohono O’odham Nation appealed that decision on Wednesday, court records show.

“We will not let this destroy our sacred sites, our burial sites, our holy places, the places of our ancestors,” Jose said at the town hall, pausing to stress his sentences. “We will not let it destroy our environment. We will not let it further divide our people. We will not let it divide our reservation.”

This article first appeared on AZ Luminaria and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Ocean Vuong's "Independence Day" opens with a son, a hospital bed, and a sparkler — and then redefines what freedom means. In this close reading from our new Poem a Day series, we trace how a Fourth of July toy becomes an act of radical tenderness, and how the title's patriotic promise gets quietly rewired into something far more intimate.

A son carries a sparkler across a parking lot toward his dying mother's car. It's the cheap kind you'd buy for a backyard Fourth of July. He slips it into her mouth.

This is the climax of Ocean Vuong’s “Independence Day” — and once you’ve read it, the title never means what you thought it meant again.

We come to a poem called “Independence Day” braced for flags and backyard barbecues, the noise of collective celebration. Instead: a hospital gown, a parking lot, a mother dying while her son holds a “stupid sparkler / raised in my fist” — a party favor standing in for something closer to a torch. The gap between what the title promises and what the poem delivers is the first ache of the piece — and it never fully closes.

It just changes shape.

The poem opens in a “blue American night,” and Vuong makes that word do three jobs at once. It’s the literal color of a lit sky. It’s the blues — grief, the low hum of a loss already underway. And it’s the blue of the flag, tying this private death to something stubbornly, almost absurdly national. None of these readings cancels the others. They stack, which is how grief actually works: you don’t feel one thing at a time.

Against that blue, the speaker raises his “stupid sparkler... in my fist” — the fist of protest, holding not a weapon but a party favor doomed to burn out in seconds. It’s flowers pushed into rifle barrels: soft defiance against something that isn’t moved by softness.

The flower that becomes a weapon

That sparkler is described as an “electroshocked dandelion” — and this is the image the whole poem is quietly built around. A dandelion is childhood, wishes blown into the wind. Electroshocked, it’s a wish-flower burnt down to a wire skeleton. Vuong plants this three stanzas before he needs it, so by the time the sparkler goes into his mother’s mouth, the poem has already told you exactly what that gesture means.

Just before the central moment, the poem makes its quiet, decisive turn: “No we’re not / falling. Things are just floating back / where they belong.”

Falling implies collapse — a defeated, downward motion. Floating implies return, like seafoam drifting back into a painter’s dream. It’s the speaker refusing to let his mother’s death be narrated as loss, insisting instead on homecoming — a small act of will, made out of nothing but word choice.

Then it happens. Vuong isolates the act with a stanza break that lands mid-motion:

Slipping it in my mother’s mouth

The line cuts before the sentence finishes, and the reader is stranded there — inside the gesture, unresolved — for exactly as long as the white space demands. It’s a technique doing work no adjective could manage: you sit in that pause the way the speaker must have sat in the instant itself, unable to look away and unable to finish the thought cleanly.

There’s no fire, no drama, no collapse.

What follows is almost startlingly gentle: “I tell her / she can go anywhere, be anyone / in this vast, possible land now / that she’s a ghost.”

The sparkler doesn’t need to combust for the moment to land — the tenderness of the telling is the whole weight of it.

By the end, Vuong has fully rewired his own title. This isn’t independence as nation — it’s independence as release: from the sock factory, from the hospital gown, from the body itself.

The mother becomes “the freest / thing I know” — a ghost who can “go anywhere, be anyone / in this vast, possible land.”

It’s a strange consolation, but it’s earned. Vuong never pretends death is anything but an ending. He just insists an ending can also be a door.

The sparkler is a toy and a scalpel. In Ocean Vuong’s “Independence Day,” a mother’s death becomes the one kind of freedom the day was always circling.

Ocean Vuong is a MacArthur Fellow and the bestselling author of "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous." His poetry collections include "Night Sky with Exit Wounds" and "Time Is a Mother." He was born in Saigon and raised in Hartford, Connecticut.

The GIST
On August 14, a federal judge told the Trump administration to cooperate with the Tohono O'odham Nation on border wall construction.

Eleven days later, the government's version of cooperation arrived at 4 a.m.: roughly twenty masked and armed federal agents, a Border Patrol SWAT team, and contractors drilling on tribal land — all while CBP's commissioner claimed the court had "affirmed" a project the court pointedly did not affirm.

Here's what happened on the ground, what the law actually says, and why sixty feet of 119-year-old paperwork is about to become the biggest sovereignty fight in the borderlands.

“A Federal Court Has Affirmed It.” It Didn’t. Then CBP Sent a SWAT Team Anyway.

A judge told the government to cooperate with the Tohono O’odham Nation. Eleven days later, masked agents blockaded tribal police instead.

by Three Sonorans

On Tuesday, as armed federal agents were still on the ground on the Tohono O’odham Nation, CBP released a statement from Commissioner Rodney Scott announcing the agency is “moving forward with a 62-mile project to close a longstanding border security gap in Southern Arizona.”

Then came the money quote:

“Congress funded this work, a Federal court has affirmed it, and CBP is carrying it out under the legal authorities that apply.”

A federal court has affirmed it.
Interesting.

Because here is what actually happened in federal court, as Courthouse News reported: on Friday, August 14, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington, D.C., denied the Nation’s request for a preliminary injunction.

That’s it.

He did not dismiss the tribe’s lawsuit. He did not “affirm” the wall. He did not bless Tucson 5. He declined to hit pause while the case proceeds. Then, in an 18-page opinion, he closed with a warning shot at the government he had just ruled for:

“While I have concluded that a preliminary injunction is unwarranted, I fully expect the Government in the months ahead to follow through on its guarantees of consultation and cooperation with the Nation to address the Nation’s concerns regarding border wall construction!”

Eleven days later, the government’s idea of “consultation and cooperation” arrived at 4 a.m. wearing masks.

Nothing says “government-to-government relationship” quite like a pre-dawn tactical deployment against the other government.

Here’s what that looked like on the ground.

Contractors bored into the desert floor at three separate sites, taking soil samples for a border wall the Nation has explicitly, repeatedly, and legally refused to allow.

For weeks, the Nation had been drawing its line in the sand: literally posting “No Trespassing” signs, putting Tohono O’odham Police Department officers on alert, and asking seven border wall contractors to leave tribal lands under Title 4 of the tribal code.

On Monday, Chairman Verlon Jose stood with Rep. Adelita Grijalva at Quitobaquito Springs, the sacred desert oasis the first Trump wall already scarred, and called for a halt to the project.

“Obviously the first wall didn’t work,” Jose said that day.

“We have a lot of other tools out there we could be utilizing that would not destroy the land, that would not destroy the sacred sites, that would not destroy these holy places, these religious sites... places where we call home.”

Here’s what happened, what the law actually says, and why sixty feet of 119-year-old paperwork is about to become the biggest sovereignty fight in the borderlands.

The Raid

According to the Nation’s leadership, the federal convoy rolled in around 4 a.m. while most of the Nation slept. The details, as reported by AZCentral and the Tucson Sentinel, read like a show of force brought to bear on a tribal government:

• Roughly 20 masked, armed CBP agents, including the agency’s tactical SWAT unit, plus BIA law enforcement

• DHS contractors operating drill trucks for soil sampling at three locations near the border

• A vehicle blockade physically preventing Tohono O’odham police from approaching the work sites to issue trespassing citations

• A tethered surveillance balloon overhead, per tribal statements, because apparently drilling on someone else’s land requires air support

• The Nation also said Mexican federal police were positioned south of the border in coordination with DHS

Let that middle point sit for a moment. The United States government deployed armed agents to stop tribal police from enforcing tribal law on tribal land. The Tohono O’odham Police Department, a force that has partnered with the feds on border security for decades, was blockaded like a protest crowd.

Chairman Jose called the deployment of BIA officers, the Bureau of Indian Affairs — the agency supposedly charged with the federal trust responsibility — alongside a Border Patrol SWAT team “deeply disturbing,” and said the incursion is “putting in jeopardy our decades of successful partnership in protecting the border.” Translation: the Nation spent generations being the most reliable border-security partner Washington had in southern Arizona, and Washington repaid it with a blockade.

Tribal leadership said officers documented everything but couldn’t issue citations without “risking further escalation,” and urged members to stay calm and stay safe.

The Nation says it has posted drone footage of the incursion on its website, along with photos of the active borehole drilling. Because in 2026, a sovereign Indigenous nation needs its own air force just to prove what Washington did to it.

Jose told KJZZ that Border Patrol told his office the pre-construction work would continue for seven to ten days. It’s an ongoing occupation of tribal work sites, guarded by federal agents, with contractors drilling soil-sample boreholes every quarter mile.

Jose put the sovereignty violation in terms Washington might actually understand: “If I were to go into Washington, D.C. or any other federal establishment, and do exactly what they are doing to us here, they would not stand for it.”

Sixty Feet of Paperwork

The administration’s real legal hook is older and thinner than Scott lets on.

Leon found that a 60-foot strip along the border — designated a federal “public reservation” by proclamation of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907 — likely exists and gives Washington room to build without formally altering the reservation’s boundaries; he also found the Nation hadn’t shown it was likely to win its trespass and boundary claims, at least not at this preliminary stage.

Sixty feet — the exact length of a bowling lane — is the full depth of Washington’s legal claim across 62 miles of O’odham land. Roosevelt claimed it in 1907, half a century after the O’odham watched the United States finish carving their homeland in half with the border itself in 1853.

Those sixty feet of century-old paperwork are the administration’s central legal theory for a 62-mile steel wall, not a settled verdict in its favor.

But the Nation doesn’t just dispute what happens outside the strip. It disputes the strip itself. Jose told KJZZ that Border Patrol informed his office they would stay within the 60-foot Roosevelt boundary: “which the nation is of the position doesn’t exist.”

Chairman Jose’s response to the ruling was blunt:

“Too many critical issues were not adequately addressed, such as inevitable impacts construction will have on the Nation’s land and the permanent destruction of sacred sites. The Nation will consider all possible options for moving forward, as this issue is simply too important to the O’odham.”

Follow the Money, Count the Steel

The Three Sonorans rule: when they say “security,” check the receipts.

On June 26, CBP awarded the project to SLSCO LTD, a construction outfit out of Galveston, Texas — because nothing says “Arizona border security” like a Gulf Coast contractor — with nearly $47 million in congressional funding authorized through last summer’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

That’s $758,000 per mile of initial funding, before a single bollard ships.

A billion-dollar option.

And the money isn’t buying a fence — it’s buying an escalation. What’s standing there now is a vehicle barrier: steel bollards about four feet high. The plan replaces it with a 30-foot primary wall, concrete footers and all. That’s a 7.5× escalation in steel for a stretch of desert the government itself has long policed in partnership with the Nation.

For two walls, across land whose owners said no.

And here’s the kicker on timing: CBP told the court actual construction won’t likely begin until October 12, 2026. The drilling underway now is pre-construction soil sampling, by CBP’s own account — which makes Tuesday’s armed escort a choice, not a deadline.

They sent a SWAT team to guard soil sampling seven weeks ahead of anything the government itself calls construction.

An Old Pattern, Bigger Than One Contract

If this feels familiar, that’s because it is.

The O’odham didn’t cross the border; the border crossed them. Their homeland was split in 1853 when the United States bought the bottom of Arizona from Mexico and drew a line through a people who had farmed, hunted, and prayed in that desert for centuries.

Then came 1907 and Roosevelt’s sixty-foot strip.

Then came the first Trump wall, when contractors dynamited Monument Hill, a burial site, and graded across the thousand-year-old Las Playas intaglio, and when Quitobaquito Springs, one of the only sources of fresh water in that whole desert, took damage the Nation had warned about for years.

The Nation’s own No Wall archive reads like a catalog of wounds.

CBP’s own stated rationale, in Scott’s Tuesday statement, is that Tucson 5 will close “one of the most dangerous smuggling and trafficking corridors on the Southwest border.” The Nation’s longstanding counter-position is that its police department and existing federal partnerships already secure that stretch of border more effectively than a second wall would.

And Tucson 5 isn’t happening in isolation.

In November and December 2025, DHS and CBP separately awarded five other Smart Wall contracts totaling $3.3 billion across Texas and Arizona, including a $1.5 billion Tucson 2 project elsewhere in the sector. Tucson 5’s roughly $47 million is a small slice of a much larger, fast-moving buildout, not an isolated project.

Trust with the Tohono O’odham Nation was already limited going into Tuesday. Now it’s cut further.

Colonization doesn’t always arrive with cavalry anymore. Sometimes it arrives with a contract number, a press release, and a drill truck at 4 a.m.

The Resistance Is Already Organized

Here’s what the commissioner’s statement didn’t mention: the wall isn’t built, the lawsuit isn’t over, and the opposition is already coming from multiple directions.

• In court: The Nation’s suit against DHS proceeds, and as of Thursday, Jose confirms his office is appealing Judge Leon’s ruling and assessing further pathways to oppose the wall. Leon left “significant uncertainties” hanging over any construction outside that sixty-foot strip, meaning even Leon didn’t rule out future trespass claims. Tribal leadership says attorneys are preparing “appropriate legal filings” in response to Tuesday’s incursion.

• In Congress: Grijalva announced at an Ajo town hall hosted by the International Sonoran Desert Alliance that she’s introducing legislation to rescind DHS’s sweeping waiver authority: the REAL ID Act power that lets the secretary wave aside environmental and cultural-protection laws with a signature. On August 25, Grijalva, Ruiz, Escobar, and Vargas — all border-district representatives — sent a formal letter to DHS and the Department of the Interior demanding they immediately halt secondary-wall construction, writing they are “concerned by the federal government’s failure to meaningfully consult with tribal nations” on sites including Monument Hill and Quitobaquito Springs.

• In the county: The Pima County Board of Supervisors has passed a resolution opposing the wall, and the tribe has publicly thanked Pima County and the City of Tucson for standing with it, per the Tucson Spotlight.

• On the ground: The Nation turned away contractor after contractor for weeks before Tuesday. Tribal rangers and police are documenting everything. The Nation has released drone footage of the incursion on its website, along with photos of the active borehole drilling. And the Nation has asked community members to report suspicious activity to the Tohono O’odham Police Department at (520) 383-3275 rather than intervene directly — discipline, not retreat.

That’s the part worth sitting with: the O’odham response to masked agents on their land was not chaos. It was cameras, code citations, court filings, and a congresswoman. Sovereignty exercised the way sovereignty actually works — law by law, witness by witness.

One more thing worth flagging: AP wire coverage this week has already started describing this as the administration “starting to build” the wall. It isn’t, not yet, by the government’s own account to the court. Watch for that framing to harden into consensus before a single wall panel goes up — it’s a preview of how “pre-construction” quietly becomes “construction” in the retelling.

Jose framed the stakes generationally: “What are we leaving for the generations after us? ... it’s already divided our people.”

What do you think?

What should southern Arizona look like on October 11? And what should the consequence be when a federal law-enforcement agency misstates a court ruling to justify an armed deployment?

If you want in:

• Follow and share the Nation’s official updates at its No Wall page, including the drone footage the feds would rather you not circulate.

• Back Rep. Grijalva’s effort to strip DHS’s law-waiver authority. Call your own rep and ask where they stand.

• And if you value this kind of coverage, the kind that reads the court opinion and the contractor’s invoice, support independent borderlands journalism at Three Sonorans on Substack.

Stay loud, stay grounded, and keep your eyes on Sells.

Si se puede — y los O’odham ya están en ello.

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Three Sonorans is an independent Substack rooted in Tucson, the borderlands, and the tribal nation Washington keeps mistaking for conquered ground. When a federal commissioner can misstate a judge's own words to justify masked agents at 4 a.m., somebody has to keep the receipts. Share this piece — a federal agency's press release doesn't get corrected by itself.

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The GIST

The Trump administration’s lawsuit against Arizona is a direct assault on voters’ 2022 decision to grant in-state tuition to undocumented students who graduated from Arizona high schools.

The stakes are clear: federal pressure to reverse what is arguably one of the most pragmatic, widely supported policies protecting immigrant access to higher education in the country.

Here’s what the lawsuit means, who’s fighting back, and why this moment matters for Arizona’s undocumented students.

by Molly Bohannon, Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting

The Department of Justice on Thursday sued Arizona and the state Board of Regents over a law granting in-state tuition to undocumented students who attended and graduated from Arizona high schools.

The Trump administration alleges Proposition 308, which voters narrowly approved in 2022, “constitutes blatant unequal treatment favoring illegal aliens over U.S. citizens” and is “squarely prohibited and preempted by federal law.” The lawsuit asks a federal judge to declare the law unconstitutional and permanently prohibit its enforcement.

Prop. 308 made students eligible for in-state tuition if they graduated from an Arizona high school after attending for at least two years, regardless of their immigration status. Prior to its passage, national experts estimated that 3,600 undocumented students could qualify for in-state tuition annually.

An AZCIR investigation earlier this year found that schools documented far fewer students receiving the reduced tuition, in part because they lacked a uniform system for implementing and tracking the policy. The federal government now argues that Prop. 308 is unlawful regardless of how many students benefited from it.

Though Arizona’s law did not make residency an explicit requirement, the DOJ contends that attending an Arizona high school for at least two years is “a near-perfect proxy for residence,” since public schools are required to collect “verifiable documentation of residency” when students enroll.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, who previously defended Arizona’s policy as consistent with federal law, rejected that interpretation. Her spokesperson, Richie Taylor, said the complaint “rests on a faulty premise.”

Megan Gilbertson, a spokesperson for the Arizona Board of Regents, said in a statement that officials are “reviewing the lawsuit and will work closely with Arizona leaders on the appropriate next steps.”

The Trump administration has filed similar suits in 20 other states, including three also filed Thursday against New Mexico, Washington and Oregon. Some, like Florida, have voluntarily rescinded their policies, while others, like Minnesota, have defended their legality.

Tyler Montague, a Republican strategist and former chair of Yes On 308, said the federal challenge of Arizona’s law doesn’t make sense from a policy perspective.

“There are plenty of issues and problems surrounding undocumented immigration, but kids starting to go to college to be self-sufficient aren’t one of them. They’re one of the opportunities in that realm,” he said.

Prop. 308 took effect at Arizona’s public colleges and universities in spring 2023. But the law did not require schools to report how many students used the tuition provision.

As part of its investigation, AZCIR requested information from 22 public community colleges and universities on how many students had received in-state tuition through Prop. 308. Only seven schools could provide data, while 14 said they did not track usage. One did not answer.

Across the seven schools, about 720 students had received the in-state rate as of fall 2025, the majority of them at Arizona State University. For comparison, nearly 12,000 undocumented students are estimated to be enrolled in higher education in Arizona, with about 1,000 graduating from high school in the state each year.

Advocates who work with undocumented students told AZCIR that differences in how schools implemented the policy had created confusion. They suspected some students were still paying the higher tuition rate—150% of the in-state rate—that applied to undocumented students at state universities before Prop. 308 passed. Others may not have known about the lower rate and therefore not seen college as a realistic option, they said.

Carolina Silva, executive director of ScholarshipsA-Z, a southern Arizona nonprofit working with undocumented students, called the lawsuit part of a broader effort to reverse in-state tuition policies for undocumented students and restrict their access to higher education. She said Prop. 308 was approved by voters and is consistent with state and federal law, adding that her organization expects the challenge “will not hold up in court.”

Aliento, a nonprofit that works with undocumented Arizonans and has advocated for stronger implementation of Prop. 308, similarly criticized the lawsuit as an effort by the DOJ to “do everything they can to stop Dreamers from attending college” in a statement to AZCIR.

“Dreamers” typically refers to immigrants who were brought to the United States without legal status as children and grew up here. Many have temporary deportation protection and work authorization through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program.

“For Arizona Dreamers, it is important for you to know that you belong in higher education and you have the support of Arizona voters and Aliento,” CEO Reyna Montoya said. “A lawsuit does not change Dreamers ability to pay in-state tuition. This can be confusing, but I encourage you all to keep going and get an education.”

This article first appeared on Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The GIST

Tucson’s political machine has a habit: it hires the unqualified and removes the people who ask questions. A CFO without a CPA runs $800 million in school funding and refuses to publish Budget Books on time. A 24-year-old political science graduate, with zero teaching experience, earns $91,770 to run an education nonprofit whose flagship program didn’t run at all this year.

The city has the talent. It just doesn’t have a hiring system that cares to find it.

✉️ Why Tucson's Education Leaders Got Their Jobs (Spoiler: Not Qualifications)

💪 Meritocracy Is Dead in Tucson—And Tucson's Schools Are Paying the Price. How appointment pipelines that run through relationships instead of résumés hollow out the institutions that matter most.

by Three Sonorans

Two days after a Tucson school board member publicly asked why her district’s finance chief had quietly stopped showing the public how it spends $800 million a year, that finance chief answered her from a taco stand.

Not in a memo.
Not in a board meeting.
Not even to her directly.

On Facebook, from a table at Tacos Apson, Ricardo “Ricky” Hernández, Chief Financial Officer of Tucson Unified School District, wrote that after “23 years” in the business, his “career will outlive” the objections of “one of your elected bosses.” He named no one. He didn’t have to. Board member Sadie Shaw had just written an op-ed asking where the district’s Budget Book went. Two days later, Hernández told the internet, in Spanish slang for nonsense, that her complaints didn’t matter.

Here’s the detail that turns a bad Facebook post into a pattern: Hernández doesn’t hold a current CPA license. Meanwhile, the volunteer TUSD pushed off its own Audit Committee for asking too many of the wrong questions; John Blackshire actually has one. TUSD removed the credentialed accountant from the room and kept the CFO who isn’t one.

Down the street, a nearly identical story was unfolding at Tucson’s education nonprofit. Same pattern. Same silence from the people supposed to be watching. Same outcome: the unqualified guy keeps his job, and the qualified people who ask questions get shown the door.

Tucson didn’t need a Canadian to tell us this. We have Ricardo Hernández and Rocque Perez, two men who somehow keep finding new ways to demonstrate it, on the public payroll, at public expense.

The Thesis, Stated Plainly

This is not a story about two isolated bad hires. Bad hires happen everywhere; organizations misjudge people, and sometimes even due diligence fails.

What happened at Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) and at the Southern Arizona Education Council (SAEC) is something more specific and more structural: appointment pipelines that run through relationships, not résumés, feeding into institutions with governance too thin, too tangled, or too intimidated to correct course once the appointment is made.

Tucson has institutional talent to spare.

Sylvia Campoy has represented the Latino Plaintiffs in TUSD’s federal desegregation case for decades. John Blackshire served on TUSD’s Audit Committee until he asked too many tough questions and was pushed out. Four ordinary residents, on their own initiative and their own time, did the compensation math on a nonprofit CEO’s contract that Pima County’s own staff never bothered to run.

None of these people got the sinecure.
The sinecures went elsewhere.

Exhibit A: Ricardo Hernández and the Budget Nobody Gets to See

TUSD's Chief Financial Officer manages a budget for a district that enrolled over 60,000 students when Adelita Grijalva joined its Governing Board in 2002; today it enrolls roughly 35,000.

That's a loss of over 1,000 students per year for nearly a quarter-century; a decline driven by state-level austerity, birth-rate collapse, and the expansion of charter schools and vouchers.

Hernández has held that post since May 2022, and the district’s public record does not show a current CPA license in his name. His own Facebook boast that his “career will outlive their pendejadas” after “23 years” in the business refers to two decades in school finance broadly, not two decades running TUSD’s books specifically.

It’s a résumé, not an answer.

He was right to be confident that the post would cost him nothing. Two of Shaw’s own board colleagues turned on her publicly within minutes of her raising the issue, not on him.

John Blackshire, the former Audit Committee vice-chair, has separately alleged that the district’s internal audit function has been hollowed out; the internal auditor position remained vacant for an extended period before being filled in February 2026. When citizen testimony pointed out gaps in his budgeting practices at an earlier meeting, Hernández’s on-record response was to call it “an absolute lie.”

At the district’s August 25, 2026 meeting, a letter defending Hernández from Deborah D’Amore, the former Pima County Deputy Superintendent who worked alongside him “for literally a decade,” was accepted after the board’s own submission deadline. Board president Natalie Luna Rose read it into the record anyway, over Shaw’s objection. Shaw pointed at a related problem on the record: the letter came from an office where, she said, the CFO’s wife works. “Our CFO’s wife is in the board office,” Shaw said at 01:33:27. “Typically, if you submit a letter after 12 PM, you have to wait for the next meeting... nepotism and cronyism seems to reign supreme in this district.”

That’s Shaw’s characterization of why the letter was accepted late. But within minutes, two board colleagues responded directly to her criticism: Jennifer Eckstrom argued the district would receive the budget book “in September, not November” and that Shaw had “called out board office staff for a decision that was made by a governing board member,” calling this “unfortunate."

Luna Rose, announcing “I guess since I’m breaking the rules, I’ll break another one,” defended the previous CFO for not being “as open” as Hernández and suggested Shaw should use the RFI process instead of public complaint. Neither addressed the core issue Shaw raised: the CFO’s wife working in the same office, or Hernández’s Facebook post calling Shaw’s objections “pendejadas.”

Exhibit B: Rocque Perez and the Nonprofit That Forgot Its Own Mission

Perez was in his mid-20s, a 2022 University of Arizona political science graduate, when he was hired in February 2024 to run what was then the Metropolitan Education Commission.

The organization was rebranded to SAEC in 2025.

It was co-founded in 1990 by then-Supervisor Raúl Grijalva and then-Mayor Tom Volgy. His pay was later set at $91,770 a year, contractually pegged to 95% of a Pima County Supervisor’s salary. His two predecessors, June Webb-Vignery (founding director, 1990–2017, and a Ph.D. historian) and Arlene Benavidez, topped out at $70,937 and $36,539–$50,000, respectively, over their much longer tenures.

Perez’s salary is, depending on the predecessor, tens of thousands of dollars more than either woman ever made for the same job, with far less experience.

The Grijalva connection isn’t incidental color. Raúl Grijalva’s daughter, Adelita—now a U.S. Congresswoman (since November 2025) but at the time a Pima County Supervisor—sits on SAEC’s governing board and spoke at the organization’s 2026 celebration paying tribute to her father’s legacy. She also endorsed Perez’s 2026 state Senate run, though Tucson.com’s own reporting notes the endorsement came only after the campaign had been underway for months, which undercuts a “kingmaker” framing without eliminating the pattern: this is an organization whose board has Grijalva family presence, run by a man the Grijalva network eventually backed for higher office.

Perez lost that Senate primary to Rep. Alma Hernandez on July 21, 2026. Weeks later, Pima County took up a $122,000 no-bid renewal of SAEC’s contract, retroactive to a term that had already begun.

Arizona Corporation Commission filings show Perez signed the organization’s official paperwork as President and CEO on October 2, 2025, not during his Senate campaign, which didn’t launch until December 17, but during the unpaid leave he’d taken to serve on the Tucson City Council, the same council that helped fund the organization he was signing for.

SAEC’s flagship program, a 30-plus-year civic education initiative called Teen Town Hall, did not run at all during the prior contract year, the one Perez was already leading when the county sat down to renew the next one.

No financial consequence followed.

Board Chair Jennifer Allen sits on SAEC’s own governing council: the same supervisor who personally moved approval of the county’s $122,000 contract, which the Board passed 4-1 on August 25. The overseer didn’t just share a boardroom with the overseen. She made the motion to keep paying it.

And then the machine explained itself, out loud, on the record.

Supervisor Andrés Cano voted with her, telling the board his support was “irrespective of who the executive director is,” and that scrutinizing any one of the 130 organizations the county funds would set a bad precedent. Cano is also a disclosed alum of the organization’s own youth programming. The man voting to keep the money flowing told the room, in the same breath, that it doesn’t matter who’s running it and that he came up through it himself.

Supervisor Steve Christy cast the lone no vote, calling the arrangement “many red flags” that “stinks to high heaven.” Supervisor Rex Scott offered a substitute motion to fund the contract at $40,000 instead of $122,000. It died for lack of a second. In this machine, even the compromise couldn’t find a friend.

Worth noting, since it happened in the same meeting and got the same non-response: Rabbi Samuel Cohen, a Pima County congregational rabbi of 27 years and a longtime Metropolitan Education Commission member, used his public comment to accuse Perez of running an antisemitic campaign against the opponent who beat him.

"Many times Mr. Perez advanced anti-Semitic tropes about dual allegiance, foreign, meaning Jewish, money and corporations," he told the board.

No supervisor asked Perez about it when he took the podium minutes later. No supervisor raised it during deliberation. The same board that let that charge pass without a single question is the board that just voted 4-1 to keep paying him.

The new contract now requires SAEC to reach 4,000 students for college or career support and get at least 2,500 of them through applications, scholarships, or FAFSA, benchmarks the organization had never previously been held to.

The self-dealing didn’t start with the county contract, either.

While serving on the Tucson City Council in 2025, Perez directed part of a $500,000-plus Ward 5 discretionary surplus, including ARPA funds, into a package that combined $300,000 in competitive small-business and community grants with roughly $290,000 in direct investments.

AZPM reported the Metropolitan Education Commission itself, the organization Perez was on leave from and would return to lead within months, among the direct-investment recipients. A sitting councilmember steering part of his own discretionary budget toward the nonprofit waiting for his return doesn’t need an itemized receipt to raise the obvious question.

The undisclosed number is itself the story.

The Machine, Named Carefully

So how does this happen twice, in two different institutions, in the same city, at the same time?

Here is what’s documented, and only what’s documented: both men’s institutional homes trace back through the same narrow band of Tucson Democratic political infrastructure. SAEC was founded by Grijalva and still carries Grijalva family board presence. But the Grijalva grip on TUSD itself runs far deeper than co-founding a nonprofit.

What follows is not a critique or an attack, but a look at the pattern. The reader can draw their own conclusion based on the facts.

Raúl Grijalva served on the TUSD Governing Board from 1974 to 1986 (12 years, including six as board chairman) before moving to the Pima County Board of Supervisors. His daughter, Adelita, was elected to the TUSD board in 2002 and served for 20 years, tied for the longest tenure in TUSD history. She didn’t wait for that tenure to end before taking on a second seat of power: from January 2021 until she left the TUSD board in 2022, Adelita Grijalva sat on both the Pima County Board of Supervisors and the TUSD Governing Board at the same time. Two years overseeing county government while simultaneously governing its largest school district.

Between father and daughter, a Grijalva held a TUSD board seat for 32 of the 48 years between 1974 and 2022. 1974 is also when the half-century-long desegregation case against TUSD began; the same year Raúl took his first TUSD board seat.

That’s not incidental board presence.
That’s institutional infrastructure.

TUSD’s governance disputes play out among board members and staff embedded in the same overlapping Southern Arizona political circuit; the one that produces county supervisors, city council members, and nonprofit board seats, often cycling the same handful of people through all three.

Nobody needs to allege a smoke-filled room. The public record already shows dual-hatted board memberships, contract renewals without competitive bidding, and colleagues defending each other in circumstances where independent oversight should exist but doesn’t.

A machine doesn’t require a conspiracy. It just requires enough shared relationships that nobody with the power to say no ever has an incentive to do so.

Watch the same names cycle through three different bodies in five years.

2020: the Board of Supervisors appoints Betty Villegas to a seat she never ran for, after Supervisor Richard Elías dies. She relinquishes it that November when Adelita Grijalva wins the election outright.

2023: the same Board appoints Villegas again, this time to the Arizona House seat Andrés Cano vacated for Harvard, with Board Chair Adelita Grijalva herself making the motion.

2025: after Raúl Grijalva’s death sends his daughter to Congress, the Board appoints Cano back to the District 5 seat Grijalva is vacating. Villegas, twice appointed by a body that included Grijalva, later submits a letter to the county supporting Perez’s contract renewal. It was supporting a nonprofit the Grijalva family co-founded, on whose board Adelita still sits.

The machine doesn’t stop at elected officials and appointees.

The same discretionary funds and no-bid contracts that keep men like Perez and Hernández insulated also flow, in smaller amounts, to the local nonprofits and community organizations meant to hold this political infrastructure accountable.

When your operating budget depends on staying in the good graces of the people who control the purse strings, publicly challenging them stops looking like advocacy and starts looking like risk management.

That’s not a conspiracy. It’s just what happens when the watchdogs need a grant renewal from the people they’re supposed to be watching.

Edgar Soto, Pima Community College vice president, is currently running for the Arizona State Senate in LD17 while still holding his campus post, the same pattern of an education-sector employee splitting attention between a day job and a campaign that defined Perez's run last cycle.

Unlike Perez, Soto was never appointed to anything except by PCC to Vice President; he lost his own 2024 Board of Supervisors primary outright to Jennifer Allen, the same supervisor who now chairs the Board that just approved Perez's contract.

But the Grijalva connection isn't absent here either; it's a family one. Soto is the brother-in-law of Augustine "Auggie" Romero, the former Pueblo High School principal who admitted in 2016 to illegally changing students' grades in violation of state law and TUSD policy. Adelita Grijalva, then a TUSD board member, publicly defended Romero and voted against ending his contract in 2018, though the board majority overruled her and terminated his contract anyway.

It's one more thread in the same small fabric: the same names, the same family connections, the same handful of institutions, showing up again and again across Tucson's education and political landscape.

The Mathematician’s Turn

The numbers do the arguing better than adjectives can.

A 24-year-old political science graduate with zero classroom teaching experience now runs an education nonprofit that pays him $91,770 a year; tens of thousands more than the Ph.D. historian who founded it made in her final years. Perez makes this salary to run an organization whose signature program didn’t happen at all this year.

The Arizona Auditor General flagged TUSD on six of ten financial-risk metrics — sixty percent — on a district that hasn’t shown the public a full budget book in going on two years. Hernández has run TUSD’s finances since 2022 without a CPA.

And here’s the detail that should make every accountant in this city wince: John Blackshire, the audit-committee volunteer TUSD pushed out for asking too many questions, actually holds a CPA. The district removed the credentialed accountant from the room and kept the CFO who isn’t one.

A school finance department with no CPA. An education organization with no educator. What could possibly go wrong?

A bunch of pendejadas, por supuesto.

Competence and compensation are not just uncorrelated in these two cases. They’re inversely related, and the gap is measured in real public dollars. Call it what it is: not job security, but sinecurity; a position so secure precisely because the work it demands is optional.

Meritocracy: Tucson’s Unmet Promise

Somebody always pays for a sinecure.
It’s just never the man holding it.

TUSD’s budget opacity isn’t a paperwork inconvenience; it’s every family in the district trying to guess how $800 million of public money moved, in a district that has spent decades under a federal desegregation order precisely because it has a documented history of shortchanging Black and Latino students.

SAEC’s mandate includes underserved students who didn’t get their civic education program this year, full stop, no refund. Job security for two men translates directly into less scrutiny, less transparency, and less accountability for the working-class parents, immigrant families, and Black and Latino students these institutions exist to serve.

That’s not collateral damage.
That’s the whole arrangement working exactly as designed.

Arizona routinely ranks near the bottom nationally in education funding and outcomes. That’s not a partisan talking point; it’s a recurring line item in the state’s own report cards.

And here in Pima County, in the Democratic strongholds that are supposed to know better, supposed to be the adults in the room compared to the state legislature they love to mock, the actual on-the-ground practice is keeping a CFO without a CPA in charge of $800 million in school funding and installing a political-science graduate to run education programming.

If this were happening in a county Democrats didn’t control, it would be Exhibit A in every op-ed this publication has ever run. It’s happening in the county Democrats do control, and somehow that’s supposed to be a different story.

It isn’t. Tucson is not short on qualified people. It is short on a hiring and oversight system that reliably finds them, or that cares to look once the résumé has the right last name or the right endorsement attached.

Sylvia Campoy has the institutional memory.
John Blackshire has the actual CPA and got shown the door for using it.

Four residents with no title and no staff did the compensation analysis Pima County’s own government never bothered to run. The talent is here. It’s just not who keeps getting hired.

Until that changes, Tucson will keep getting the Rickety-Rockety version of civic leadership, nodding along at meetings while the Peter Principle runs the district and the nonprofit both, and paying full price, in dollars and in outcomes, for the privilege.

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Three Sonorans is an independent Substack rooted in Tucson, the borderlands, and the institutions that would rather you didn’t do the math. If two overpaid, underqualified men in charge of your kids’ education and your tax dollars made you want to file a public records request, share this. That’s how accountability actually happens here: not from the people with the sinecures, from the people paying for them.

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The GIST

A four-hour-late letter got read into the record anyway, overruled live by TUSD's own board clerk. Then two board members spent the rest of the night attacking the colleague who noticed, while the CFO who's kept the district's Budget Book hidden since 2024 said nothing at all.

This is what accountability looks like when the board would rather defend a silence than a spreadsheet.

📋 TUSD's CFO Skipped the Budget Book. His Board Attacked the Woman Who Noticed.

A four-hour-late letter, an overruled objection, and $807 million nobody's allowed to check.

by Three Sonorans

Sadie Shaw pointed out that TUSD’s CFO’s wife works in the board office minutes after the board’s own clerk personally overruled her objection to bend a rule to draft a letter defending him. Two of her colleagues turned on her for it, on camera, within minutes.

The letter arrived at 4:09 p.m., hours past the noon deadline stated on the district’s own website.

Shaw raised a point of order, telling the board the letter had come in after the cutoff. Board Clerk Natalie Luna Rose overruled her from the chair: “Well, I will take a point of privilege with the governing board clerk and read the letter.”

The decision to bend the rule wasn’t made by staff behind a desk. It was made by an elected official, live, in front of the cameras. Even Eckstrom conceded as much later that night, telling Shaw it was “unfortunate that you’ve called out board office staff for a decision that was made by a governing board member.”

The meeting had opened, hours earlier, with a memorial for longtime board member Joel Ireland, who died the previous week. Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva, who served alongside him for six years, relayed advice she said he gave her: “You shouldn’t burn bridges, because you never know when that person you’re disagreeing with now might be someone that is an ally... every time we have public disagreements, who really hurts is the district, the students, the teachers.”

Ireland’s advice didn’t survive the night.

“Someone once told me I shouldn’t be here to fight your fight. So I’m just going to leave it with that.” — Jennifer Eckstrom, TUSD Governing Board member

Board member Jennifer Eckstrom went first.

“Calling Ms. Hernandez out, she’s not even here, is unfortunate,” Eckstrom said, framing Shaw’s comment as an attack on a district employee rather than a conflict-of-interest concern.

Shaw tried to clarify: she was also referencing a separate consent item she says was “coded in a punitive way” targeting her, and added, “if it was you, Ms. Eckstrom, you best believe all of us would agree that that conduct is not OK.”

Eckstrom wasn’t interested in continuing the exchange. “Someone once told me I shouldn’t be here to fight your fight,” she said. “So I’m just going to leave it with that.”

Board Clerk Natalie Luna Rose took the next swing, running the meeting in Board President Dr. Ravi Shah’s temporary absence. She defended CFO Ricardo “Ricky” Hernández’s record at length, partly blaming the state’s financial-risk flag on staff raises.

Shaw corrected her on the record: “We did not get flagged because we gave raises to [teachers]. There are six indicators that we got flagged for.” That matches the state Auditor General’s financial-risk report, which flagged TUSD on six of ten metrics.

Luna Rose kept going: “I also think sometimes you make comments that will rile things up for really no reason... if somebody were to pull our votes, Ms. Shaw, we vote together. We vote like 90% of the time.”

Shaw pushed back that the state’s financial-risk flag shouldn’t fall on staff but on “the CFO who is tasked to keep us compliant.”

Luna Rose’s answer, thirteen seconds later, was a direct defense: “I think Mr. Hernandez has been doing a good job. And that’s where we disagree.”

Two board members, in succession, treated a sitting colleague’s transparency complaint as a personality problem. Neither addressed whether the Budget Book Shaw was actually asking about had, in fact, been withheld.

It had. Eckstrom’s own defense that night was that the board could get the Book “in September, not November,” and that older editions “from 2022” are already posted online. Two Septembers have now come and gone since the full version stopped appearing at all.

Eckstrom also told Shaw she was “disappointed” Shaw would suggest board members “resign if we don’t have a budget book.” That’s not what Shaw said. Shaw’s actual line, moments earlier, was about the CFO’s wife-in-the-board-office issue specifically: “Any elected official who puts their personal relationships over their responsibilities that they were duly elected to do should resign now or straighten up and fly right.”

Eckstrom answered a claim Shaw never made.

Not every voice in the room defended Hernández by attacking Shaw. Derika Louk, an Audit Committee member with a background in school finance, argued the substantive case for the state’s summary forms during Call to the Audience, real work, in her telling, not a smokescreen. The piece isn’t required to relitigate her argument here, but it existed, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.

Notice who did the attacking that night, and who didn’t.

In that room, it wasn’t the CFO, and it wasn’t the superintendent. It was two of Shaw’s own colleagues, elected to the same board, doing the work Hernández didn’t have to do himself. More work he doesn’t have to do, like publishing the Budget Book on time.

Here’s the thing. Go back and read what Shaw actually said, the comment that triggered all of it: “As you know, our CFO’s wife is in the board office. Typically, if you submit a letter after 12 PM, you have to wait for the next meeting... nepotism and cronyism seem to reign supreme in this district.” That’s a governance complaint about who benefits from staff discretion. It names a role, not a person’s character.

Later that same night, Shaw apologized for it anyway, twice, on camera, by name. “My comments earlier in regard to Mrs. Hernandez were inappropriate,” she told the room. “I was definitely triggered by the perceived perception that a positive letter to one of our administrators can skirt the rules... it was not appropriate for me to lash out to her. And I sincerely apologize.”

She wasn’t done: “And I did also apologize to Mr. Hernandez as well.”

Compare that to what Hernández actually did. Two days after Shaw’s op-ed questioning TUSD’s missing Budget Book ran in the Arizona Daily Star, he posted on Facebook: “one of your elected bosses puts you on blast,” closing with a boast that his “career will outlive their pendejadas.”

He named no one directly, but the timing did the naming for him. He insulted her in public. The standard he owes her is public too, and he hasn’t met it. Shaw apologized for a process complaint that read as personal, on camera, twice.

Hernández has never had to answer, on the record, for a comment that was personal on its face.

What This Was Actually About

Sit with what Luna Rose and Eckstrom were defending.

Somewhere between the FY25 budget revision the board approved in August 2024 and Tuesday’s meeting, this board has been asked to approve, and has approved, hundreds of millions of dollars in spending without the searchable document that used to let a board member check the CFO’s math.

Eckstrom told Shaw she’s “able to request information” and “able to get information” anytime, framing the Book’s absence as Shaw’s failure to file the right paperwork.

Get the causality straight, because the board didn’t.

The “pendejadas” post is the symptom. The disease is that Hernández stopped publishing TUSD’s Budget Book in 2024 and has been asking the board to approve budgets in the hundreds of millions without it ever since.

John Blackshire made that case in an analysis on the Accountware Group’s site, published the night before the meeting, framed entirely in internal-controls language rather than outrage. Worth knowing who’s talking: Blackshire is the former CPA vice-chair of TUSD’s own Audit Committee, removed by a 4-0 board vote with one abstention in May after he pushed a basic accountability question about the district’s fuel logs, Three Sonorans reported at the time. He’s grading the same institution that fired him for asking questions. That’s worth weighing.

It’s also exactly why his read on “tone at the top” carries some weight.

“Tone at the top is an internal-control issue.” — John Blackshire, former TUSD Audit Committee vice-chair

“Tone at the top is an internal-control issue,” he wrote, arguing that when “a senior financial executive publicly ridicules an elected official for requesting greater transparency,” the message that travels through the rest of the organization is that “challenging management is dangerous” and “longevity provides protection from accountability.”

His bottom line: “TUSD does not need more attitude from financial management. It needs answers, detailed financial reporting and accountability.” Among the corrective actions Blackshire recommends: Hernández should “apologize directly to Sadie Shaw and the public.” A CPA reviewing this from the outside landed on the same standard this piece opens with.

Strip away the cronyism comment and the apology, and what’s left is a simple, still-unanswered request: give the board its Budget Book back.

Since 2012, TUSD has produced a 200-plus-page document, searchable by school and department, that lets the board and the public actually see where the district’s money moves. This publication has used a version of that book for over a decade of reporting, including confirming this July that a whistleblower’s staffing claim was overstated by more than double, though the document behind that July reporting was a narrower, less detailed record than the comprehensive Budget Book the board and public used to get.

That night’s Call to the Audience had already run long on the Hernández-Shaw feud before any of this happened.

Luna Rose read a letter into the record from a former Pima County Deputy Superintendent who says she “worked alongside Rick Hernandez for literally a decade,” arguing that “attacking his competence, integrity in public forums is uncalled for and reflective more of an accuser than the accused.”

Sylvia Campoy, who served as the Latino Plaintiff representative in TUSD’s decades-long federal desegregation case, argued the opposite, and she argued it from specific institutional standing: budget transparency was one of the things that case fought to guarantee.

“For years, those involved in the desegregation case demanded that the entire budget be presented in a comprehensive manner so that all employees and members of the public could easily understand it,” Campoy wrote. “Progress was made in this regard, but over the last several years it has slipped back into a black hole.”

She called Hernández’s “pendejadas” comment “insulting, crass, and extremely unprofessional as used against a Governing Board Member.”

“Ms. Shaw is a Black American female, which further calls into very high question Mr. Hernandez’s inappropriate conduct.” — Sylvia Campoy, former Latino Plaintiff representative, TUSD desegregation case

Shaw asked for two things on the dais, both specific: “I would like to see that all of us on the governing board really push for the budget book to arrive in a timely manner before we make a vote,” and a formal review of whether Hernández’s public comments about her violated board policy GBEB-R, the district’s own staff-conduct policy.

Luna Rose did name the policy: "Policy GBEB-R pertains to staff conduct. And I don't feel that there was anything that was said. As public officials, the five of us sitting up here, we have to take it."

She dismissed the concern outright, then pivoted to the district's information-request process and staff raises. Notice the inversion: GBEB-R governs staff conduct, and Shaw was asking whether a staff member's conduct toward a board member violated it.

Luna Rose answered by explaining why board members must absorb criticism, not by whether staff crossed a line.

Notice, too, who's saying it.

Luna Rose also offered her own read on the timeline.

“In the six years that I’ve been serving on this board, I feel like the word budget book has only been lexicon for the last two,” she said.

Read that again: by her own account, the Budget Book only became a topic of dispute two years ago, right when it disappeared! Former board member Mark Stegeman was doing this same forensic work over a decade earlier, catching errors in the FY2015 budget and forcing that conversation into the open, so the practice Shaw is defending isn’t new.

What’s new is a CFO deciding the board doesn’t get to see it anymore.

The Board Split 3–2 on Closures

The board took its vote on the future of school closures inside the Duffy Community Center, a building on East Fifth Street that used to be Duffy Elementary until TUSD closed it in 2010.

Buried under two hours of Hernández fallout was the night’s other real story: the board split, 3–2, over whether Superintendent Gabriel Trujillo’s community-engagement plan for closing schools was ready.

Trujillo’s “Reimagining Our Schools Together” plan proposes a phased closure process, with the first wave of closures targeting the 2027–28 school year.

Shaw objected on the numbers: “We can very well lose 10,000 families in a very short amount of time in this process,” she warned, arguing that families told their school sits in “phase three” will simply leave for charter schools rather than wait out the uncertainty. She also flagged that only three community meetings were currently scheduled, called the plan “kind of bare bones,” and asked for it to come back at the next meeting with real feedback incorporated.

Eckstrom, who lived through TUSD’s 2012 round of school closures as a parent, joined Shaw in voting no. Romero and Luna Rose voted yes; Board President Shah, who arrived mid-meeting after his daughter’s freshman open house at Tucson High, cast the deciding vote to move forward anyway.

The framework passed, 3–2, over the objections of the board’s only closure survivor and its loudest skeptic.

What the framework now decides, ahead of any closure vote, is the engagement schedule leading up to it: three community meetings this fall, then a phased plan that the board will vote on in December. Trujillo told the board he will personally deliver the news to affected schools once that plan is set, rather than delegate it: “I’m facing the pain in October. I’m standing in front. I’m in cafeterias.”

That’s the October Trujillo means, telling specific schools they’re under consideration, months before the 2027–28 closures he’s describing would actually happen. Whether that personal presence resolves Shaw’s underlying concern about family flight during a multi-year rollout is a question the board just voted not to answer yet.

Also at the Meeting

• Palo Verde four-day week, formally adopted, 5–0. The instructional-time model behind Palo Verde’s four-day school week, first approved by the board in April, cleared its second required public hearing and was formally adopted.

  • The district’s own April analysis priced the pilot at just over $6.2 million; Tuesday’s item carried a $7.7 million figure for the school’s total allocation, with no reconciliation offered for the drift.

  • Hernández presented the item himself.

• Exceptional-education tuition schedule, 5–0. TUSD will begin charging neighboring districts (Vail, Marana, Baboquivari, and others already in agreements) to educate their students with disabilities under a state-prescribed cost formula, projected around $600,000.

  • Hernández co-presented with Dr. Sabrina Salmon; Shaw’s questions focused on whether the district is adding classrooms or filling existing ones.

• Bond-funded bus purchase, 4–1. The board approved $3.7 million in bond spending for Sabino High parking-lot repairs and 20 new 14-passenger buses.

  • Board President Ravi Shah cast the lone no vote, saying the district hadn’t done its due diligence on the board’s own sustainability policy before recommending gasoline buses.

• New board-agenda software, 5–0. The board approved switching vendors, from Diligent to Concourse, after staff complaints about the current platform.

  • Diligent runs the district about $26,000 a year; Concourse comes in at $20,000 a year, or $100,000 over the five-year contract, which runs through June 2031 with annual renewals.

    • The district is still negotiating whether it can claw back any money from the existing Diligent contract.

• Carpenters’ Hall, sold for $475,000, 5–0, no questions asked. The board approved selling the former Carpenters’ Hall building at 606 and 630 South Plumer Avenue to W/W Group LLC, sixteen years after voters first authorized the sale in 2010.

  • CBRE brokered the deal; the buyer says it plans a mixed-use creative center for artists.

  • Moved by Eckstrom, seconded by Shah, passed without a single question from the dais.

• Pueblo High’s broken AC, raised from the dais, no vote taken. Teacher Cristobal Barajas wrote a letter, read into the record by colleague Ben Koehler, describing “at least a dozen classrooms” at Pueblo that “are regularly over 80 degrees.”

  • Staff have been overflowing into the library as a stopgap, but the library can only hold five classes, so most teachers are stuck in their hot rooms anyway.

  • Eckstrom pressed Trujillo directly, noting the district has heard this complaint “year after year.”

  • Trujillo said the district’s COO had walked the facilities that same day, confirmed 12 classrooms with “coil issues,” and said a team would be out the next day to get them resolved by “tomorrow or the day after.”

  • He also floated seeking bond capacity to fix Pueblo’s aging HVAC system for good, the same bond fund the board tapped for buses and parking lots earlier that same night.

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Three Sonorans is an independent Substack covering Tucson, the borderlands, and the school board meetings that run past 10 p.m. specifically because nobody with power expects the room to still be watching by then.

An $807 million budget without a budget book isn't a paperwork problem; it's a power problem, and pointing that out shouldn't cost a board member two public apologies while the person actually withholding the numbers says nothing at all.

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The GIST

A rabbi detailed a documented record of antisemitic campaign rhetoric to the Pima County Board of Supervisors. They voted to give the man at the center of it $122,000 without a single question. Inside the vote that turned a funding fight, a water crisis, and a downtown land deal into a portrait of what this board chooses to see—and what it won’t.

A Rabbi Warned Them About Antisemitism. Pima County Voted Anyway.

Four supervisors kept Rocque Perez’s organization funded at the full $122,000 Tuesday night, with new reporting strings attached. None of them asked him about “unseat a Zionist.” Inside: the funding fight, the Colorado River math, and a downtown building handed to Taiwan.

by Three Sonorans

A rabbi stood at the podium Tuesday night and told the Pima County Board of Supervisors that the man they were about to fund had run a campaign built on “unseat a Zionist” fundraising appeals, accusations that his opponent was bankrolled by foreign money, and rhetoric a Jewish congregational leader of 27 years called straight out of the oldest documented racism in human history.

Nobody on the dais asked Rocque Perez about it. More than an hour later, they gave him the money anyway, all $122,000 of it.

Rabbi Samuel Cohen, founder of the Multifaith Alliance, a decade-long chair of community 9/11 commemorations, and a longtime Metropolitan Education Commission member himself, didn’t come to talk about deliverables. He came to talk about what Perez said to win, and lose, his only election.

“Many times Mr. Perez advanced anti-Semitic tropes about dual allegiance, foreign, meaning Jewish, money and corporations, as well as attacking AIPAC,” Cohen told the board, adding that Perez’s campaign had “used his opponent’s Jewish identity and her support for Israel as though it were part of a conspiracy against Tucson residents.”

His three minutes ran out mid-sentence. Chair Jennifer Allen told him he was welcome to submit the rest in writing.

Cohen’s account is independently documented and, if anything, undersells it. Jewish Insider reported that Perez, running against Rep. Alma Hernandez in the Legislative District 20 Democratic primary for state Senate, sent a fundraising message asking supporters to contribute $5 to “unseat a Zionist” and repeatedly claimed Hernandez was “bankrolled” by AIPAC, a lobbying group that does not fund state-level races. The Anti-Defamation League documented that campaign signs bearing Hernandez’s name were defaced during the race with the words “ZIONIST BITCH.” Hernandez won the primary and told Jewish Insider afterward that voters had “rejected antisemitism.” The Algemeiner reported that Perez’s rhetoric went unrepudiated by the Democratic officials who’d endorsed him, including Tucson Mayor Regina Romero. None of it came up when Perez took the same podium fifteen minutes later to defend his contract.

To be clear about what’s being reported here: this is not a judgment on Israeli policy, Gaza, or the broader Zionism debate, where Three Sonorans readers hold a wide range of views. It’s a factual account of specific campaign rhetoric, dual-loyalty and foreign-money tropes, a “Zionist” framed as an enemy to be defeated, documented independently by Jewish Insider, the ADL, and The Algemeiner, not asserted by this outlet.

No supervisor asked him about it. No supervisor raised it during deliberation.

When Christy later asked, for an unrelated procedural reason, whether the motion on the table included keeping Perez as director, Allen answered on the record: the vote was to “fund the money to the organization regardless of personnel or executive leadership... that’s not our decision.”

That is the board’s own explanation for the silence, spoken by the chair, not just an inference drawn from it. The documented campaign record is now sitting next to that vote, unanswered, in the same public file.

“This whole thing stinks to high heaven”

The board split 4-1.

Supervisor Steve Christy was the only no, and he didn’t spend his three minutes on the antisemitism record either. He spent them on structure, running through the arrangement that has Perez sitting on the Tucson City Council seat that let him direct his predecessor’s leftover discretionary city funds to the same commission he now runs, then going back to run it.

“This whole thing stinks to high heaven. There are flags and signals that are saying so. And I just can’t understand why my colleagues aren’t more concerned about how taxpayer money is being spent and where the money is going and who’s in charge of it.” — Supervisor Steve Christy

He was not, it turned out, alone in the room, just alone on the dais.

Arizona Daily Independent had already reported that the board delayed an earlier vote on this same contract amid public backlash, and that Perez’s own predecessors ran the organization on far more revenue while drawing salaries $51,000 to $85,000 lower than his. Three Sonorans has tracked this contract since the money reckoning first surfaced.

SAEC, the Southern Arizona Education Council, brokers college-access services for Tucson-area students: FAFSA help, peer coaching, scholarship programs. It’s the money and the mission that three public speakers, not aligned with each other, a Small Business Commission member, a former state senator, and a self-described proud Democrat who owns a business downtown, independently picked apart from three different directions during public comment.

Their shared conclusion: the numbers don’t support the ask.

Kent Blumenthal opened with the enrollment math. He also opened the county’s eyes to a set of numbers that should have already been in the packet: half of SAEC’s board seats sit vacant, an AmeriCorps partnership lapsed with no public explanation, and the organization’s marquee program for three decades, the Teen Town Hall, simply didn’t happen this year.

“SAEC has underperformed,” Blumenthal said. “Its underperformance does not justify funding at the same level Pima County has contributed since 2022.”

One of those points got an answer in the same meeting: Mariana Martinez, a Pueblo High School graduate and SAEC peer coach now at the University of Arizona on a $100,000 scholarship, testified that the AmeriCorps lapse traced to Washington, not Tucson, telling the board the federal government had terminated $400 million in AmeriCorps grants nationwide.

Maria Garcia, a former state senator and former Pima Community College governing board member, brought the receipts on duplication. PCC’s financial aid office already walks students through the FAFSA one-on-one, free, she told the board, the same service SAEC gets paid to broker. She totaled SAEC’s own reported numbers: nearly $298,000 in revenue, about $57,000 net, up to $100,000 a year flowing in from the Arizona Board of Regents through SAEC’s Peer Coach Program.

“Yet the county has been asked to provide more than six times the city’s recurring $19,580 allocation,” Garcia said. “I urge the board to match the city revenue investment rather than providing $122,000.”

Doug Levy went further than either of them, into the ledger itself. Tim Steller’s column in the Arizona Daily Star had already flagged some of the same numbers days before the meeting. He’d read Perez’s memo line by line, he told the board, and it raised more questions than it answered.

“Mr. Perez now acknowledges that $52,200 of the $122,000 Pima County allocation went toward personnel expenses, nearly half of the county’s contribution,” Levy said.

He flagged the vanished Teen Town Hall by its paper trail rather than its absence: SAEC’s own expenditure records, he said, show “a $207 cancellation fee paid for the venue in November 2025,” meaning the organization’s own bookkeeping confirms a program billed as a 30-year tradition simply didn’t happen. On the salary, Levy took apart the inflation defense point by point.

“Mr. Perez’s materials use inflation to justify his salary, pointing back to approximately $70,000 salaries for his predecessors,” he said. “But inflation alone cannot be the standard for taxpayer-funded compensation. Compensation [should track] responsibilities, performance, and measurable delivery.”

Jay Tulkoff, a Pima County resident of 48 years who told the board he’d personally employed close to 10,000 people over his career, added a data point of his own from the 130 pages of SAEC financial records he said he’d read in the past week: the organization “in one month paid three months of rent with penalties.”

He wasn’t willing to render a verdict on Perez’s leadership outright. He was willing to say the paperwork didn’t look like it came from a well-run operation, and that a contract that expired at the end of the fiscal year was still being negotiated a month and a half later.

“I would say they don’t have their eye on the ball the way it should be,” he said.

The defense: growing pains, not a scandal

Perez took the podium in the same public-comment period reserved for the people questioning him, a choice that put him in the unusual position of defending his own contract from the citizen’s chair rather than as an invited presenter. He framed the entire controversy as manufactured.

“There’s a commonality within the outside interest in this, and unfortunately it’s political and personal,” he said, casting the scrutiny as an extension of the legislative primary he lost to Alma Hernandez in July. He credited the organization with doubling its revenue over the past year and asked the board to treat any shortcomings as “growing pains.”

Growing pains for a three-decade-old organization?

He also invoked, unprompted, his own resume as a former Tucson City Council appointee: “When I was a city council member, I was the one that did the groundwork to ensure that we fronted some cost” for other school-district partnerships, he told the board, presenting his past dual role as evidence of civic commitment rather than the conflict several speakers said it represented.

It is worth sitting with that claim for a moment.

The chair backed Perez’s compensation, and her funding figure held.

Allen disclosed her own seat on SAEC’s governing council up front and pushed back hard on the idea that the board had any business second-guessing Perez’s pay. “I don’t believe that it is the role of the Board of Supervisors to be micromanaging decisions that are made by... the Executive Committee,” Allen said, comparing it to the county’s hands-off posture with every other contracted nonprofit it funds.

She also read the loudest part of the controversy, teachers arguably deserving Perez’s roughly six-figure treatment more than he does, as an argument aimed at the wrong target. “It is wrong, woefully wrong, that our teachers are underpaid,” Allen said. “But I don’t think that that is an argument for lowering the bar... It should be about raising the bar for educators.”

How the vote actually happened

Three motions, in order:

1. Allen’s original motion: fund the contract at the full $122,000 and leave personnel decisions to SAEC’s own board.

2. Scott’s substitute (failed): Rex Scott, the supervisor whose questions had launched the scrutiny back in July, broke from Allen and moved to fund SAEC at $40,000, matching the city’s contribution plus its in-kind facility value, with the county committing to match, dollar for dollar, any new outside funding SAEC secures above what it raised last fiscal year, capped at the full $122,000.

   1. There’s an irony buried in how Scott got there: he built the number by crediting a “valid point” Perez himself had made, that the city’s contribution should count its rent-free facility, not just its $19,580 line item. Perez’s own argument for a bigger baseline became the arithmetic behind a proposed two-thirds cut to his own guaranteed funding.

   2. It didn’t matter. Nobody seconded it. “So not hearing a second, we will continue on,” Allen said, and the room moved on as if it had never been said.

3. Allen’s remade motion (passed 4-1): the county was less than a minute from voting on Allen’s original motion when Cano interrupted on a technicality: splitting the vote between the contract amount and the administrator’s recommendations wasn’t how the item had been agendized.

   1. Allen withdrew and remade it, folding in the county’s oversight terms rather than separating them: fund the contract at the full $122,000, plus three conditions from County Administrator Jan Lesher’s August 5 memo, a reporting matrix of monthly, quarterly, and annual deliverables; quarterly reports to the board starting October 1; and a formal amendment to the county’s SAEC resolution to be taken up September 8.

   2. Lesher later confirmed on the record what that meant in practice: without the required reporting, “the next checks wouldn’t be sent.”

   3. The money is not contingent on Perez raising more of it, as Scott’s failed substitute would have required. It is contingent on the paperwork showing up.

Scott voted for the final motion anyway, and said why.

“I am going to support your new motion, because although I disagree with the amount... the measures that are recommended by the county administrator in her August 5th memo... are going to safeguard our investment,” he told the board, before pivoting to his own reasons for asking the original questions.

“I asked these questions not to start up some kind of intra-party dispute,” Scott said, distancing his original inquiry from the primary-season framing Perez tried to pin on it. A former principal and nearly three-decade educator who sat on SAEC’s predecessor board himself, Scott said he’d waited two months for answers and gotten them, eventually.

“I do feel good about what I’m hearing about the peer coaching program,” he said. “I just want my colleagues to know... I have a fiduciary responsibility, as all of us do, when we’re considering a contract, a six-figure contract.”

Supervisor Andrés Cano supplied the emotional register the other yes votes didn’t. A former SAEC youth participant himself, Cano called the vote “irrespective of who the executive director is” and framed opposition to the contract as a threat to the 4,000 students SAEC’s new deliverables promise to reach.

He also drew a pointed comparison: the county funds more than 130 outside nonprofits, he said, and “if I were to go line by line asking each and every single one of them about some of the concerns that have been brought for this contract... I just don’t think it’s a good precedent.”

Supervisor Matt Heinz didn’t dwell on Perez at all.

He put SAEC’s $122,000 ask in context of what the county funds elsewhere without comparable hand-wringing, noting the county sends the Southern Arizona Chamber half a million dollars a year, and called the FAFSA increase reason enough to keep the county’s name on the letterhead.

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Water, Taiwan, and a downtown building nobody agrees on

Arizona just lost more than a quarter of its Colorado River water. Four days later, the same board handed a downtown building to a semiconductor talent pipeline, after roughly fourteen minutes of real discussion and a unanimous round of thanks.

The Interior Department finalized new Colorado River operating rules cutting Arizona’s allocation by 760,000 acre-feet a year, more than a quarter of the state’s supply and the largest reduction of any of the three Lower Basin states. Four days later, the same board that spent an hour litigating a $122,000 nonprofit contract voted to hand over the historic Roy Place building downtown for a semiconductor talent pipeline with Taiwan.

The Arizona-Taiwan Talent and Innovation Hub, a University of Arizona and National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University partnership, will occupy the former Walgreens building across from county government, with a ribbon-cutting in October. University Chief Research Partnerships Officer Dr. Linda Bixby called it a pipeline for “one of the world’s leading semiconductor ecosystems.”

City of Tucson’s newly appointed chief economic development officer, Mike Czajkowski, backed it up.

Christy was the only supervisor to push back, not on the partnership itself but on the real estate math: a downtown building with, in his words, real revenue-generating potential being handed over to an academic use rather than the tax rolls.

“It should be put to use to derive income,” Christy said, suggesting a university tech park instead.

Supervisor Heinz, headed back to Taiwan the next day, brushed the concern aside with a downtown-synergy pitch, citing the building’s proximity to county government, city hall, and the courts.

Chair Allen followed with her own request, asking Administrator Lesher for a fuller memo on where the semiconductor courtship is actually headed, so the county doesn’t take “one small step, a small step, a small step” and “arrive somewhere without seeing the big picture from the outset.”

That request opened a door Cano walked through.

He asked Lesher directly whether the Roy Place parcel had been revenue-generating before it sat vacant. “Yes, the lease amount was $100 a year,” Lesher answered, a figure that would buy roughly forty minutes of downtown street parking, then explained the county doesn’t structure such arrangements as a gift: the return comes back as services and benefit rather than rent, “not simply because we were giving him something nice.”

Cano’s own follow-up undercut any reading of that as a win for Christy’s tax-roll argument: “And that’s pretty typical of academic partnerships,” he said. Christy pressed the real-estate question one step further, asking whether Rio Nuevo, the downtown taxing district built specifically to chase sales-tax-generating uses, had ever expressed interest in the building; county infrastructure director Carmine DeBonis said Rio Nuevo had general interest in the area but no specific proposal on record, meaning the closest thing to a bidding war never happened.

It passed 4-1, same lopsided count as SAEC, Christy again the lone no vote, this time for reasons that had nothing to do with dysfunction and everything to do with the county’s balance sheet.

Nobody on the dais connected the two headlines from the same week, an emptying Colorado River and a fresh embrace of the most water-intensive industry on the planet, but at least one public commenter did.

Melinda Matson-Spina invoked “hyperscale data” and “mass surveillance” in the same breath as “radioactive reprocessing” and warned supervisors that “politicians who make deals or decisions around technology before real rules for that technology even exist are not serving the people,” name-checking the county’s prior entanglement with the Project Blue data center fight that pushed the City of Tucson to adopt its own large-water-user ordinance just weeks earlier.

Also at the meeting:

• A moment of silence: Supervisor Rex Scott, early in the meeting, noted the death of Joel Ireland, a 20-year Tucson Unified School District Governing Board member, seminary and law school graduate, former priest at St. Michael’s and All Angels Church, and preservationist who helped save several historic homes near the University of Arizona; the board observed a moment of silence in his honor.

• Item 18, Pima County Economic Development Strategic Plan: Continued to September 22 by unanimous vote, after Chair Allen requested a dedicated study session; she flagged the plan’s thin treatment of rural unincorporated Pima County, undefined KPIs, an unfinished logic model, and a total absence of the low-wage worker perspective from stakeholder input.

• Item 14, Achen-Gardner Construction protest: The board voted 4-0 (Supervisor Heinz absent) to accept the construction firm’s appeal of a procurement director’s denial on a wastewater conveyance contract; the underlying contract itself returns to the board September 8.

• Addendum item 3: The county voted 4-1 to join a multi-state lawsuit challenging a proposed federal Office of Management and Budget rule; no supervisor elaborated on the record about which rule or why one supervisor opposed joining.

• Items 20–27, water and fire district elections: Bundled and passed 5-0, canceling uncontested elections for the Green Valley, Marana, Metropolitan, Mount Lemmon, and Avra Valley domestic water improvement districts, among others, standard housekeeping for boards nobody ran against.

• Items 28–30, Eric Marcus Municipal Airport (Ajo) grants: Two FAA infrastructure grants passed 4-0, totaling more than $830,000 for what officials described as safety and economic-development improvements at the county-owned Ajo airport.

• Item 2 on the consent calendar: Pulled for separate consideration and passed 4-1; the board did not discuss the substance on the record.

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Three Sonorans is independent borderlands journalism that stays in the room when the gavel falls. If a board can spend an hour on FAFSA line items and zero minutes on a documented pattern of antisemitic tropes, someone has to put both in the same public file. This piece exists because readers fund the kind of reporting that doesn’t look away from either.

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by Sasha Hupka, Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting

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The GIST

A $122,000 nonprofit contract, a third of Arizona’s river cut in one federal decision, and a semiconductor courtship signed four days later. This is what happens when a county board can’t answer simple questions about money while it’s quietly deepening ties to an industry that drinks like the desert is infinite.

🌵 The Formula and the Calendar: Four Doors and a Drought at Pima County’s Tuesday Meeting

Two weeks of paper trails, one Friday document dump, and a semiconductor vote four days after the feds cut Arizona’s river by a third: your field guide to the August 25 Board of Supervisors meeting.

by Three Sonorans

Here’s the number nobody in this fight has actually interrogated: 95 percent of a Pima County Supervisor’s salary. That’s the formula the Southern Arizona Education Council used to set CEO Rocque Perez’s pay at $91,770, which was adopted on January 26, 2026. Days later, he launched his campaign for state Senate.

Stop and ask what that formula is even doing there.

A supervisor’s pay reflects representing roughly 200,000 constituents across 9,000 square miles of county government. What does that have to do with running a K-12 advisory nonprofit with a handful of staff, on a contract whose deliverables the county’s own memo says weren’t met?

Nothing. It’s not a compensation philosophy. It’s a number pegged to a job that has nothing to do with the job actually being paid for, and it happened to be adopted the same month a campaign launched. The paper trail doesn’t care whose side you’re on. It just shows the formula and the calendar, sitting next to each other, unexplained.

The Pima County Board of Supervisors doesn’t hire him, doesn’t fire him, and isn’t voting on his job. What it’s voting on, at 5:00 p.m. on August 25 at 130 W. Congress, is whether the county keeps paying for it, four days after the feds cut Arizona’s Colorado River allocation by a third and the board simultaneously courts the thirstiest industry on Earth.

One agenda, two reckonings: what public money is for, and who public water is for.

Four Doors, One $122,000 Question

The contract at the center of the money reckoning: $122,000 from the county’s General Fund to SAEC, the former Metropolitan Education Commission, founded in 1990 by then-Mayor Tom Volgy and then-Supervisor Raúl Grijalva.

If approved, it’s retroactive to July 1, 2026, running through June 30, 2027. Two weeks ago, at the August 11 meeting, Board Chair Jennifer Allen did something chairs almost never do: she reached into her own agenda and yanked this item, citing “inconsistencies” in the paperwork. The board continued it 5-0. That fuse burns out Tuesday.

County Administrator Jan Lesher’s latest memo doesn’t offer a simple renew-or-reject choice. It lays out four doors:

Doors two through four all contain some version of the word “accountability.” Perez’s own memo argues most forcefully against door two, insisting that “personnel and program expenses are not independent functions.” (That list of staff duties is long. Somehow “run a seven-month campaign for state Senate” didn’t make it.)

Doors three and four peg the county’s contribution to whatever the City of Tucson puts in, a logic that runs deeper than politics, since the organization’s old name, Metropolitan Education Commission, was built from the start as a joint city-county body.

Start with the résumé math.

SAEC’s founding director, June Webb-Vignery, held a doctorate and ran the organization for 27 years at a salary that topped out at $70,937. Her successor, Arlene Benavidez, brought comparable institutional experience for even less.

Perez, 27, was hired in February 2024 at 24, about a year and a half after graduating from the UA with a political science degree, with no credentialed background in education policy.

His $91,770 salary is nearly double the $50,940 median annual wage for a Tucson-area secondary school teacher in 2025, for a role that advises on K-12 education and oversees the peer coaches who help students complete FAFSA forms. The teachers doing the underlying work of the schools SAEC is chartered to serve make roughly half what its CEO makes to oversee people who help fill out paperwork.

Same job, four different price tags, per the organization’s public tax filings:

That last line deserves its own sentence.

The biweekly payments in SAEC’s own expenditure reports amount to roughly $104,200 annually, about $12,400 more than the salary cited in every public document. That gap could be nothing more than benefits and payroll taxes stacked on base pay. Nobody has been asked on the record. Nobody has answered on the record.

Neither does character enter into the Corporation Commission filing Perez signed as “President/CEO” on October 2, 2025, in the middle of the “unpaid leave” the City of Tucson had publicly announced, nor into the three different titles he held across three consecutive monthly expenditure reports.

Those aren’t opinions about a man. They’re dates on documents.

What the County’s Own Memo Actually Says

On the job description itself, the county’s own memo documents the shortfall: no Teen Town Hall this year despite a paid invoice for one, no delivered expansion into Santa Cruz County despite a contract that still names the liaison role, a lapsed AmeriCorps partnership nobody explained, and a governing board seated at half its required membership.

Instead, nearly every answer in the memo begins “as reported by SAEC,” meaning it’s Perez’s own account of his own performance, not anything county staff independently verified. The county’s pushback shows up only in scattered “Pima County Note” asides, and those are where the memo actually disagrees with him.

The rest of the ledger:

• Of last year’s $122,000 county allocation, $52,222.98 went to personnel, about 43 cents of every county dollar, per Perez’s own memo.

• The 30-year Teen Town Hall didn’t happen this year. But SAEC’s September expenditure report paid vendors for “Teen Town Hall Audio and Visual.” Money moved. The event didn’t.

• The AmeriCorps/Arizona Serve partnership that SAEC’s own quarterly report described as active “ended,” in the County Administrator’s words, with no further details ever provided.

• SAEC’s board has 12 members seated out of 24 required, per the Arizona Daily Independent. Which raises the question one letter-writer asked plainly: did the Executive Committee that approved Perez’s retroactive raise even have the quorum its own rules require?

• The employment agreement still references a liaison role to Santa Cruz County: a county that never joined, a role that by all available reports never existed.

Consider the principal analogy.

A high school principal who failed to hold Homecoming or Graduation under her watch, presided over a staff absence without explanation, let a major partnership lapse, and didn’t properly constitute her own leadership team would face scrutiny in any school district.

nstead, the memo relies almost entirely on Perez’s own account of his own performance, untouched by independent verification.

Now add this math: In June, the county distributed $1.3 million in $1,000 bonuses to permanent employees earning less than $45,000 annually, covering roughly 1,300 county workers. That wage floor represents half of what Perez makes. The county struggled to raise minimum salary to $45,000 and found the money for a one-time bonus to get there. It has no visible difficulty paying Perez more than double that figure, on a contract for deliverables the county’s own memo says weren’t met. The gap between those two wage decisions sits on the same board table.

To be fair, SAEC’s results in one area are real. Roughly 5,750 FAFSA completions in Pima County by May 1, up 20.3% year-over-year, potentially connecting students to $21.3 million to $42.5 million in federal need-based aid. The Peer Coach Program grew from 23 to 61 coaches across 18 host schools, with 16 of those schools posting gains. Nobody on either side of this fight disputes those numbers. Supervisor Rex Scott, the man who asked the hardest questions, told the Arizona Daily Star’s Tim Steller there’s been an “admirable expansion of the peer coaching program,” even while noting the organization he once served on has seen a “diminution” of its broader community role. Which makes the actual question simple, and it isn’t about anyone’s character: is SAEC doing its job it was contracted to do? Graded against that scope of services, the answer isn’t close. The FAFSA numbers are real and worth crediting. The rest of the job mostly wasn’t done.

That’s a performance metric, not a political take.

The Chair Who Pulled Her Own Item

One more thing to watch: the chair herself.

Allen pulled this item on August 11, then told the Star, for its Saturday column, that the scrutiny is election fallout. She sits on SAEC’s own governing council. Perez’s campaign website listed her as a supporter, one of a circle that stood by him straight through the primary.

“The level of scrutiny to this contract is a carry-over from the primary, and that’s unfortunate.” — Board Chair Jennifer Allen, who sits on SAEC’s governing council

So the question hanging over the vote isn’t only which door the board picks.

It’s whether the person running the meeting thinks the questions were ever legitimate at all, and whether she should be voting on funding for a body she helps govern.

Perez’s Senate run, worth noting in brief: it drew formal, on-the-record accusations of antisemitism from his own opponent, Rep. Alma Hernandez, who is Jewish and beat him by about 600 votes in the July 21 primary. She told Jewish Insider flatly, “I consider this guy to be an antisemite,” pointing to Perez’s own posts casting her as beholden to “foreign interests” and soliciting donations to “unseat a Zionist.” Perez’s campaign did not respond to Jewish Insider’s request for comment. None of that is proof of anything about how Perez runs SAEC.

And to be equally fair: some of the loudest critics carry their own alliances, and the institution’s defenders have their own roots in it.

Steller points out that critics of the contract are Hernandez allies, and that Sen. Sally Ann Gonzales, who wrote the board demanding it “fund results, not personal relationships, or political connections,” is a Hernandez ally too.

Meanwhile Webb-Vignery, who built the job Perez now holds, told the Star: “It was a stellar group that put it together. They didn’t want it to be political.”

Steller’s read: this is what it looks like when the Grijalva network’s long dominance meets newer power. His verdict on the underlying principle stands regardless:

Fair enough, and also beside the point, because the timeline doesn’t support the “political feud” premise.

This didn’t start as Hernandez versus Perez.

It started on June 3, weeks before the primary, when Supervisor Rex Scott, a former public school principal, sent Lesher ten numbered questions about SAEC’s budget, membership, staff duties, and the lapsed Teen Town Hall tradition, telling her plainly that no new contract should reach the board until those questions were answered.

Lesher’s answer confirmed the shortfalls this piece has been documenting. A county official asking a nonprofit to show its work isn’t as good a headline as an old political machine closing ranks.

But it’s what actually happened first.

What to watch: Which door gets moved, and by whom. Whether Allen recuses or explains why she won’t. Whether anyone asks, out loud, on the record, about the $12,400 reconciliation gap, the phantom A/V invoice, or the AmeriCorps answer the county never got. Mark the calendar beyond Tuesday, too: a separate vote on SAEC’s request to rewrite its founding resolution, dropping Santa Cruz County and removing the CEO seat’s public-meeting obligations, is set for September 8, per the Arizona Daily Independent. A non-answer to any of this is its own headline.

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Four Days After the River Got Cut

On Friday, August 21, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum signed the Record of Decision governing Colorado River operations from 2027 through 2036, ordering Lower Basin states to give up 1.25 million acre-feet of water a year for 2027 and 2028.

Arizona loses 760,000 acre-feet: roughly a third of its Colorado River allocation. If the snowpack keeps failing, the cuts get deeper. After 2028, the framework reverts to strict priority, and the Central Arizona Project holds some of the most junior rights in the basin.

Four days later, the board votes on a memorandum of understanding establishing the Arizona–Taiwan Talent and Innovation Hub: a partnership with the UA, the city, the Arizona Commerce Authority, Kaohsiung’s city government, and National Sun Yat-Sen University, aimed at the semiconductor supply chain.

The agenda line says “no cost.” Technically, sure: an MOU commits nothing but a framework. It’s a plan to plan.

But this publication has been following this playbook since the September 2025 declaration in Taiwan, the January 2026 university MOU, the six-party agreement signed in March, and the June mission that came home with “qualified leads” and zero named companies. Mayor Regina Romero and Supervisor Matt Heinz spent May 23 through June 4 in Taiwan on a taxpayer-funded recruiting trip, signing a sister-government agreement that names semiconductor manufacturing a priority.

So let’s do the water math the agenda won’t:

• TSMC’s first Phoenix fab uses about 4.75 million gallons of water a day. Three fabs at full operation project to 17.2 million gallons daily, more than three times what the Project Blue data center alone would have drunk. A full buildout trends toward 40,000 acre-feet a year: roughly 30 times the entire Pascua Yaqui Nation’s water supply, while that nation’s rights remain unresolved after nearly 50 years, as we reported in March.

• Even at the industry’s promised 90% recycling rate, a 10% loss per cycle means a full new infusion of water roughly every ten days. The fab doesn’t sip once and circulate forever. It drinks continuously.

• Tucson’s cushion is real but finite: a 144,191 acre-foot annual CAP allocation against under 100,000 acre-feet of actual use, with the difference banked underground in Avra Valley, about six years of savings. The 2027–28 cuts land on that banked water first. The savings account is what gets spent.

Just like the library reserves (its savings account) with PEEPs funding; but we digress…

Tucson’s large-water-users ordinance, passed unanimously after the Project Blue outcry, caps large users at 120% of their requested use and steeply escalates fines before the city can cut off a violator.

As we wrote this weekend: the ordinance regulates how efficiently a project uses water. It doesn’t ask whether the water is secure. Even the ordinance’s supporters concede the gap: UA water researcher Michael Bogan told Arizona Luminaria the rule is “insufficient for data centers,” and he’s pressed the city on how tribal communities, including the Pascua Yaqui, who rely on Tucson Water, will be consulted at all.

Now hold that against the rest of Tuesday’s agenda, because the desert keeps receipts.

Item 2 on the addendum, sponsored by Heinz himself, directs the county’s lobbyist to pursue phasing out agricultural flood irrigation at the state Legislature.

Read those two items side by side: the same supervisor who flew to Kaohsiung to recruit the most water-intensive industry on Earth wants farmers to stop flooding fields. Maybe that’s a defensible trade, since agriculture does use the majority of Arizona’s water, but the public has never been shown the ledger. Because nothing says “water conservation” like draining the acequias to fill the fabs.

Here’s the contradiction the county won’t put in one memo: the same night this board pulled the SAEC contract, August 11, it also voted 3-2 to direct staff to draft a resolution imposing a four-month moratorium on new data centers, citing exactly the water and energy concerns above.

Allen, Cano, and Heinz voted for it; Scott and Christy voted no.

Heinz, who told The Center Square the county needs “guardrails and guidelines” and “adequate transparency for residents,” is also the supervisor who flew to Kaohsiung to help build the semiconductor courtship the board deepens tonight, while the domestic moratorium waits on a drafting timeline nobody’s announced.

Both things can be true: recruiting chip education infrastructure isn’t the same as approving a data center, and the moratorium reportedly wouldn’t touch the already-approved Project Blue anyway.

If you want to know what “junior rights” means in practice, look 90 miles up the Gila. Kearny’s allotment was slashed this year to 77 acre-feet, a cut of more than 85 percent under a 1935 court decree that prioritizes who gets the river. Mayor Curtis Stacy’s April letter to residents said it plain: “We WILL run out of water on or about July 15, 2026.”

San Carlos Lake, built to hold 900,000 acre-feet, dropped to 377 by June, less than 0.05% of capacity, and every fish in it died. By late July, 44 acre-feet remained. Kearny made it through 2026, AZFamily reports, partly because residents cut use by a third and partly because the Gila River Indian Community, holding senior rights, hasn’t called them in. Stacy called that a “miracle.”

We call it what it is: Indigenous nations with paper rights older than Arizona itself are functioning as this region’s last water bank, while the new federal framework sets aside a 450,000-acre-foot tribal pool in Lake Mead that funds zero miles of pipe to deliver it. The Washington Post looked at Kearny this summer and saw a preview: “others could face the same fate.”

That’s the context in which five supervisors will vote Tuesday to deepen a semiconductor courtship: no water modeling attached, no tribal consultation on the record, and no commitment that the MOU’s “subsequent agreements,” the leases, fees, and grants that actually cost something, come back for a public vote.

What to watch: Whether a single supervisor says the word “acre-foot” before voting. Whether Heinz explains how his two items share one aquifer, and whether anyone connects tonight’s MOU to the moratorium the board ordered drafted the same night it pulled the SAEC contract. Whether anyone asks the Regional Wastewater Reclamation District, which is seeking $75 million in new debt authority on this same agenda, whether it’s modeled semiconductor wastewater chemistry, PFAS included. The MOU will pass. The question is whether it passes with the water math on the record or despite it.

Also at the Meeting

• Item 16: County Administrator Jan Lesher retires when her contract ends in January. She runs a $1.8 billion operation, the most powerful person in Pima County who’s never been on a ballot. The board discusses the hiring process, with a late-October vote planned: sponsored by Allen, with no attachment, no written process, no timeline, no public-input plan.

• Item 17: A resolution banning county employees from profiting on nonpublic information via prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, adding termination and a law-enforcement referral on top of an act that’s already a crime. Open question: does “all Pima County employees” include the five people on the dais?

• Item 18: The county’s 2026–2029 Economic Development Strategic Plan concedes, on page 9, that opposition to mining, data centers, and large-scale energy development “has contributed to perceptions of unpredictability among investors”: treating public objection as a branding problem rather than a signal.

• Addendum 3: A 3:00 p.m. executive session on suing the Trump administration over its proposed rewrite of federal grant rules, hours before the same board accepts federal FAA, EPA, and health/housing grants like it’s a normal Tuesday.

• Addenda 4, 5, and 9: Up to $75 million in new sewer revenue obligations plus a refinancing, and a $32.09 million amendment for the Tres Rios digester: all repaid by ratepayers, no voter approval required, no mention of what it does to your bill.

• Item 14: Achen-Gardner is formally appealing the Procurement Director’s decision on a wastewater job-order contract.

• Item 27: The pavement preservation contract’s headline number is $35 million in new annual authority across seven paving companies, but the real cumulative ceiling the county authorizes is $110 million, with individual job orders capped at $3 million apiece.

• Consent Item 6: Election Systems & Software’s contract extends five more years to 2031, adding $797,000 on consent: pushing the cumulative total to $5,849,212, up 559 percent since the original 2014 award of $886,947.

• Items 20–25 and Addendum 7: Five water districts, fire and health districts, and two Sunnyside school board seats filled by appointment rather than election.

• Sonic Drive-In will pay $8,000.51 for wastewater violations and attend Pollution Prevention School. Somewhere, a tater tot reflects on what it has done.

• Robert Ojeda of the Pima Council on Aging offers the land acknowledgment; the board proclaims the Southwest Soul Circuit’s 20th anniversary, honoring Kevin and Tanishia Hamilton’s two decades keeping soul music alive in this desert.

One more thing worth bookmarking past Tuesday: this same board already referred Proposition 425 to the November 3 ballot, asking voters to permanently raise the county’s constitutional spending cap by $70 million in 1979-80 dollars. Per the Tucson Sentinel, that lifts the actual expenditure limit from $817 million to $1.4 billion starting in fiscal year 2028, compounding every year after, permanently.

It’s not on tonight’s agenda. It’s already in front of voters.

But a board that spent two weeks litigating a $122,000 nonprofit contract line by line is asking voters, permanently, for standing authority to add nine figures a year without requiring another vote.

Different agenda, same math.

How to Show Up

Tuesday, August 25. Regular meeting at 5:00 p.m., doors at 4:40, 130 W. Congress Street, 1st floor. The 3:00 p.m. study session is executive-session only; the public learns what the board decides about the OMB lawsuit at 5:00, not why.

Fill out a speaker’s card for Call to the Public: three minutes each, dropping to two if 20 or more cards come in, which they well might. Written comments go to COB_mail@pima.gov. Can’t make it downtown? Stream it on the county’s Granicus portal or YouTube, or watch Cox Channel 96.

What Do You Think?

Here’s the hope, and it’s not abstract: the only reason Tuesday’s vote has four doors instead of a rubber stamp is that four residents, a retiree, two educators, and a nonprofit veteran, wrote letters, and a board that was ready to renew without questions flinched in public. That’s the whole mechanism. Pressure worked. It can work again on the water questions, where nothing yet has forced the county to say its math out loud.

And hold onto Kearny: a town allotted just 77 acre-feet for the year stretched it through the summer, because its residents cut back and an Indigenous nation with every legal right to its water let the town drink. Sovereignty and stewardship aren’t obstacles to survival in this desert. They’re the reason for it.

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Three Sonorans is an independent Substack rooted in Tucson and the borderlands, where public money follows formulas nobody interrogates and public water gets promised to industries before Indigenous nations get their due.

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