Tucson Agenda

The Tucson Agenda operates as a distinct sister publication to the Arizona Agenda. It is managed by experienced journalists Caitlin Schmidt and Curt Prendergast, who have dedicated their careers to reporting on the Tucson community.

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Listening in

2 weeks ago | tucsonagenda.substack.com | Joe Ferguson |Curt Prendergast

It started as an innocuous email for several thousand people living in southern Arizona. Rep. Juan Ciscomani was going to hold a telephone town hall in a few minutes and you were invited to listen and ask questions. We got invitations late, but more on that in a minute. The Republican Congressman from Tucson spent an hour taking questions from locals on potential cuts to Medicaid, Elon Musk’s role in DOGE and how Congress is responding to the fast-paced changes by the Trump administration.
The calm before the storm

2 weeks ago | tucsonagenda.substack.com | Joe Ferguson |Curt Prendergast

Over the next five months, the race to fill Raúl Grijalva’s seat in Congress will capture the nation’s attention. In a narrowly divided Congress where every vote holds incredible weight, this once reliably blue district in Tucson will become a battleground. We expect to see both Democrats and Republicans flood the race with massive political funding, each side eager to secure a win in one of the only special elections in the country.
Standing room only

2 weeks ago | tucsonagenda.substack.com | Joe Ferguson |Curt Prendergast

Our advice if you want to attend one of the two Tucson City Council meetings today is to come early. The agendas are chock-full of big-time issues and we expect a full house, especially for the night meeting where free transit proponents are expected to lobby the Council to find the money to keep the program alive.
Never a dull moment

2 weeks ago | tucsonagenda.substack.com | Joe Ferguson |Curt Prendergast

Even though we took last week off, the political world just kept right on turning, didn’t it? How rude. But what can you do? These are crazy times. While we were taking care of all the business and planning tasks that tend to pile up at the Agenda last week, President Donald Trump threw the global economy into disarray with tariffs, based on dubious math (potentially calculated by ChatGPT), and even floated the idea of an unconstitutional third term.
At the threshold

1 month ago | tucsonagenda.substack.com | Curt Prendergast

The question for every local official in Arizona over the past few months has been “Where do we draw the line on homelessness?”Until last June, that wasn’t a question they could do much about. A 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling held back officials in Tucson, Phoenix and other cities in the West. But a U.S. Supreme Court decision last summer opened the door for cities to crack down on homelessness.
The Horne Ultimatum

1 month ago | tucsonagenda.substack.com | Hank Stephenson

Tom Horne wants teachers to flunk more than half of Arizona’s students. Of course, that’s not how Arizona’s top school official would characterize his proposal to require teachers to fail any child who misses nine or more days of school in a year. But it would be the effect of what even he calls “radical efforts” to get kids back in schools after the pandemic — unless parents and students radically change their behavior.
The mash-up edition

2 months ago | tucsonagenda.substack.com | Hank Stephenson

In July, Arizona schools will lose a guaranteed revenue stream of roughly $300 million annually. In its place, schools are getting promises from politicians that they’ll “backfill” the lost funding and continue working on a plan to replace the funding source: Proposition 123. But at this point, even the biggest champions of extending Prop 123 say they have no choice but to let it expire on July 1.
Get to know your lawmakers’ finances

2 months ago | tucsonagenda.substack.com | Curt Prendergast

Once a year, we get to crack open financial disclosure reports and see how Tucson’s lawmakers make a living and generally poke around in their finances. It’s fun, and a good reminder that lawmakers work for you, even if they’re the ones who pass laws that you and millions of Arizonans have to follow. The financial disclosures are meant to ferret out conflicts of interest and give voters a sense of where the money that ends up in lawmakers’ pockets comes from.
Public power

2 months ago | tucsonagenda.substack.com | Curt Prendergast

One of the big questions of the moment in Tucson is whether the city should start a city-owned electric utility, stick with their longstanding ties to Tucson Electric Power, or find some other path. Right now, the Tucson City Council is sorting through their options as they consider the effects of climate change, hear from residents upset about electric bills, and keep an eye on a looming deadline next year to ask voters to approve another 25-year franchise agreement with TEP.
A lesson for the moment

2 months ago | tucsonagenda.substack.com | Curt Prendergast

The news is chaotic and confusing again. Every day another shocking item pops up. Whether it’s nominating a heavy drinker to run the world’s largest military, freezing federal funding without explanation, or a president pardoning his own family members. Like we did last week with a list of reliable sources for border news, today we’re talking about media literacy to help you make sense of what you’re seeing in the news. That includes challenging our own ingrained ways of understanding what we read.