Local lawmakers gathered in downtown Tucson on Tuesday to hold an unusual joint meeting between the Tucson City Council and Pima County Board of Supervisors.
The meeting, scheduled last month to discuss unsheltered homelessness and fentanyl use in Pima County, comes at a time when city and county leaders are working to adopt a firmer stance on public safety.
“We need to leave any previous disagreements or divisions behind us,” said Pima County Supervisor Rex Scott, referring to past spats between city and county officials.
Both groups also held their own regular meetings on Tuesday, where they worked on separate policies aimed at addressing the same issues, ranging from a county Loop safety plan to a city-level public drug use ordinance.
At the joint meeting, Deputy County Administrator Steve Holmes and Assistant City Manager Liz Morales gave presentations about their jurisdictions’ efforts to combat homelessness and fentanyl use.
Holmes focused on the services offered by the county that aim to address root causes of homelessness, like emergency rental help and a post-jail transition center aimed at keeping people from re-entering jail. Meanwhile, the city programs Morales described dealt more with the immediate needs of homeless people: shelters, outreach to encampments and Tucson Police Department efforts.
But meeting attendees were silent on one existing tension between city and county officials: frequent city criticism towards the Pima County Attorney’s Office’s handling of drug case prosecutions.
On multiple occasions, Tucson officials have said that 65% of fentanyl possession and public drug use cases brought by the Tucson Police Department to the Pima County Attorney’s Office go unprosecuted.
The most vocal pro-enforcement argument at the joint meeting came from Pima County Supervisor Steve Christy, the only Republican elected official in the room. He argued that Pima County’s homelessness issue comes down to law enforcement.
“We have all these wonderful ideas and wonderful programs,” he said. “The community doesn’t know about that, nor, in most cases, do they even care. All they know is they want the homeless situation off their streets.”
Concrete policies discussed at both legislative bodies’ separate, regular meetings Tuesday##
Tucson Mayor Regina Romero, a progressive Democrat, thanked Christy for his remarks.
“I appreciate that Pima County works a lot in prevention and intervention, but we need to make sure we are also looking at the actual concerns we have that are happening in our streets,” she said.
Though most Democrats in attendance struck a markedly different tone from Christy, their actions in separate, regular meetings revealed a growing willingness to use police to address homelessness.
In its Tuesday study session, the Tucson City Council again discussed a proposed city ordinance prohibiting public drug use, first introduced by Ward 4 council member Nikki Lee in September. Several council members expressed support for the prohibition, which was not yet voted on.
The prohibition, which is independent of the state drug laws enforced by the Pima County Attorney’s Office, would give the Tucson City Attorney’s Office and City Court more power to prosecute drug cases, something they say would let them use the threat of jail to steer drug users towards treatment at a planned sobering facility.
After the joint meeting, Pima County Attorney Laura Conover affirmed her office’s focus on violent crimes and expressed skepticism of whether the proposed city ordinance would succeed in its goals, but was conciliatory.
“If the city wants to try a thing, then I shouldn’t stand in the way,” she said.
At their regular Tuesday meeting, Pima County supervisors approved a contract with addiction treatment provider Community Bridges for the 15-bed sobering facility, paid by $1.86 million in opioid settlement funds.
They also greenlit District 5 supervisor Andrés Cano’s One Pima Initiative, which opens the county’s transition center on weekends, asks the county sheriff to reestablish patrols on the Loop bike trail and expedites $750,000 for cleaning the trail. It also sets the goal of establishing a database of shelter availability in next year’s budget.
