By Joe Snell
There is a young woman in Tucson right now who wants to be a paramedic. She has the grades. She has the drive. What she does not have is a seat because the training program she needs is operating out of a 1950s-era leased building that was never designed for the work it is being asked to do, and there simply is not enough room.
There is a small business owner on the east side who lost power after a monsoon storm damaged a power pole. A fast-moving utility crew is on site within hours, making repairs. The customer didn’t have to wait days for a repair because the utility was able to solve the problem in real time thanks to an agreement between the City and Tucson Electric Power.
There is a welder who should be working at one of Southern Arizona’s advanced manufacturing firms right now, but is not, because our career training system does not have enough space to teach him the skills an employer is ready to pay for.
These are not policy abstractions. These are people. And this November, Tucson and Pima County voters have the chance to do something concrete for all of them by voting yes on Propositions 421, 422, 425, 427 and 430.
I want to be direct about what these measures are and what they are not. They are not a wish list from business groups looking to score political points. They are five targeted investments in the things that make it possible for people to build a life and a career in Southern Arizona: reliable infrastructure, world-class education and training, sound government finances, and the quality of life that makes our region a place where talent chooses to stay.
Start with Proposition 421. TEP has operated under a franchise agreement with the City of Tucson for decades. That agreement, which allows crews to repair power lines in the public right-of-way without bureaucratic delay, expires this year but remains in effect until April. Renewing it does not raise your electric bill by a single cent. It allows repairs to be efficient, and it locks in $2 million a year from TEP for heat-resilient infrastructure. Voting yes costs nothing.
Proposition 422 asks Tucson voters to renew an existing 0.1% sales tax, one that was already in place, to keep Reid Park Zoo funded and growing. The Zoo is not just a weekend outing. It draws 600,000 visitors a year, making it a highly-visited cultural attraction in Southern Arizona. Importantly, the tax does not increase, and the measure continues to support a community asset.
Proposition 425 is the one that sounds the most complicated but is actually quite simple. Pima County is about to hit a spending ceiling set by a 1980 formula that doesn’t keep pace with the real costs of running a modern government, namely public safety equipment, construction, wages and healthcare. Raising the cap does not raise taxes. It allows the county to spend money it is already collecting on roads and flood control and the services that businesses depend on every day. Several other Arizona counties have already done this. Pima County has earned the same trust: development service fees are down 28% over the last six years, and the tax rate is on track to be nearly 70 cents lower per hundred dollars of assessed value compared to a decade ago.
Propositions 427 and 430 are, at their core, about the same thing: whether Southern Arizona will have the skilled workforce that employers need to grow here. Pima JTED, our region’s career and technical education district, has wait lists of hundreds of students at its central campus alone. Students who complete a JTED program graduate at a 97% rate, compared to 73% countywide. The bond, the district’s first ever, would build new training facilities designed to prepare students for the skills and careers regional employers in healthcare, manufacturing, welding and mining actually need.
Similarly, Proposition 430 would support Pima Community College’s first bond in more than 30 years, expanding workforce training opportunities at the post-secondary level. This bond would fund new centers of excellence in cyber, STEM, the arts and public safety, along with long-overdue repairs to aging buildings.
Taken together, these five measures tell a story about the kind of community we are choosing to be. A community that keeps the power on. That invests in the places people love. That manages public dollars responsibly. That trains the workers employers need and that students deserve the opportunity to become.
Business in Southern Arizona is not a monolith. It is the sum of individual people. The paramedic student. The small business owner. The welder. The restaurant worker who benefits when tourists come to town. The grandparent who wants their grandchild to grow up here with more doors open than they had. Every one of them has a stake in what voters decide on Nov. 3.
For these reasons and more, the Chamber of Southern Arizona Board of Directors encourages you to vote yes on Propositions 421, 422, 425, 427 and 430.
As published in the Arizona Daily Star on Sunday, October 18, 2026.
