Housing subdivisions, cotton fields and construction vehicles line both sides of Moore Road in Marana. In the distance, semi-trucks speed past on Interstate 10.
Connecting the two roadways is part of the RTA Next transportation plan that’s on the ballot as Propositions 418 and 419. Experts and the plan’s opponents have raised concerns about the project’s last-minute addition to RTA Next, a result of deals struck between member jurisdictions shortly before the RTA's board finalized the plan.
If approved, RTA Next would see a $120 million highway interchange built at Moore Road and Interstate 10 within five years, according to the plan document. The project is on a faster track than many RTA Next projects in more populated, high-traffic areas, including within Marana.
While most projects had been in the plan for months or years prior to its Aug. 2025 adoption, Moore Road first surfaced in drafts less than two weeks prior.
“That one raises some red flags for me,” said Arlie Adkins, a professor of urban planning at the University of Arizona, about the Moore Road project.
Crafting a long-term transportation plan, Adkins said, should involve several steps: establishing a shared community vision, setting broad goals to achieve it, and using evidence to evaluate how individual projects fit into those goals.
“That’s an example of the RTA board’s complete disinterest in public involvement,” said Albert Elias, Tucson’s former assistant city manager, who opposes RTA Next.
The Moore Road project would receive $30 million from the RTA Next sales tax and $90 million from the Arizona Department of Transportation, according to RTA board member Ted Maxwell. It was added to the RTA Next plan together with another highway interchange, at Rita Road in the far southeast of Tucson.
Voters have until March 10 to submit ballots for Propositions 418 and 419, which would extend a 0.5% sales tax, first created by the Regional Transportation Authority in 2006, for another 20 years to fund RTA Next, the authority’s new set of projects.
Moore Road added to plan during last-minute dealmaking##
The Town of Marana’s transportation master plan, adopted in 2024, lists a highway interchange at Moore Road as a “mid-term” goal, slated for sometime in the 2030s.
But on the RTA Next plan, the Moore Road interchange is one of a few projects planned to be built before 2031.
According to traffic counts maintained by the Pima Association of Governments, a location near Interstate 10 on Moore Road saw, on average, 1,446 drivers a day in 2024.
The number pales in comparison with two other Marana interchanges where railroad crossings currently cause backups but that are set to get RTA Next upgrades years later.
Locations around the Cortaro Road interchange saw over 20,000 passing cars a day in 2024, according to PAG data, but the interchange isn’t scheduled to get a railroad bridge until at least 2041. A location beside the Tangerine Road interchange saw 10,771 cars a day in 2024, and would get a railroad bridge between 2031 and 2036.
On the draft plan suggested by the RTA’s own Citizens Advisory Committee in Dec. 2023, the Cortaro Road interchange had been listed as a highest-level priority while the Moore Road project is absent. According to Marana’s 2024 transportation plan, reconstructing the Cortaro Road interchange was a top concern identified during public engagement, with lower support for a Moore Road interchange.
But in the spring of 2025, Marana officials decided the Moore Road project needed to be done first, before starting work on the Tangerine Road interchange, according to Marana Town Manager Terry Rozema. Otherwise, he said, construction would force all traffic in northern Marana into just one interchange at Marana Road.
“Moore Road becomes probably the most important trigger that needs to be pulled so that we can do the rest of them,” Rozema said.
The opportunity to add the project to RTA Next came when another project — an extension of Tucson’s State Route 210 — was taken off the plan in late July 2025.
According to RTA board member Ted Maxwell, Tucson had asked for its removal, wanting funds instead for repaving some of its older major streets. The extension’s $50 million local price tag was divided between those repavings and countywide pedestrian safety projects, according to the RTA’s policy subcommittee’s July 30 meeting minutes.
But Maxwell, the state appointee to the RTA board, saw another opportunity.
“I think there's an opportunity we might be missing to improve some of the (traffic interchanges),” he said at the full RTA board’s July 31 meeting.
Marana was taking another look at the interchanges it wanted, Maxwell said. Less than one week later, on Aug. 6, Marana Mayor Jon Post said he was “starting to lose (his) optimism” about the plan.
“We have some projects that really cannot wait. We really need to push those forward. Luckily enough, we have some support on the RTA board to do just that,” he told the town’s council.
Then, on Aug. 13, Maxwell introduced a new draft of RTA Next to the policy subcommittee. It kept the extra funding for repaving Tucson streets and added $50 million for rider safety measures on Sun Tran, a priority for Tucson Mayor Regina Romero. It also boosted the amount of state funding for each existing highway interchange on the plan, freeing up money to add two more: at Rita Road in Tucson and at Moore Road in Marana.
Maxwell told AZPM that the Moore Road interchange had been “a Marana request.” Post, the town’s mayor, soon began expressing optimism about the plan.
“There are a lot of good things in (RTA Next) for Marana,” Post said at an Aug. 18 Marana Town Council meeting.
The RTA’s proposed sales tax would cover only about 14% of the costs for the plan’s highway interchanges, with ADOT paying the rest. Maxwell told AZPM that when local governments commit to paying for portions of highway projects, ADOT is more likely to include them in its five-year construction plans.
"When an expansion project such as a highway interchange is part of the approved RTA plan in Pima County, the RTA essentially is able to leverage those state funds to help commit to those projects," an ADOT spokesperson wrote in a statement to AZPM, noting that the agency worked with local governments to work out funding totals in the RTA Next plan.
Removing the long-planned State Route 210 extension, which was expected to receive over $400 million from ADOT, meant the state money could be pulled to highway interchanges instead, Maxwell said.
“This is how the voters and the communities get to say what is done. Otherwise the decisions are made by ADOT,” he said.
During conversations about Moore Road, Maxwell said, ADOT raised concerns about RTA Next not doing enough for Tucson’s east side, prompting the addition of the Rita Road interchange.
“I’m going to advocate for the needs of our east side residents as much as I do of our Midtown residents, as much as I do of our northwest and south and west side residents,” Tucson Mayor Regina Romero said about the addition of the project, which would be built after 2041.
According to Adkins, the last-minute dealmaking behind RTA Next does not reflect best practices in transportation planning.
“That’s not really planning. It’s not looking at things in a coordinated way,” he said.
Every mayor and tribal chairman in Pima County gets one vote on the RTA’s board, as do Maxwell and one Pima County supervisor. On Aug. 25, 2025, they unanimously approved the final RTA Next plan and voted to call a March election.
