The following is an AZPM original production.

From the radio studios of AZPM, I'm Steve Goldstein.

Up next on this latest edition of The Press Room, this week marked Juneteenth in the US.

We'll learn more about the holiday's significance and the impact of African Americans in Southern Arizona.

Also, was a vote by the Tucson City Council anti-homeless or part of a push for more affordable housing.

I'll ask our panel of journalists.

All of that and more next on The Press Room.

(upbeat music) This is The Press Room.

Thanks very much for joining us.

We have a stellar panel of journalists today.

Caitlin Schmidt of the Tucson Spotlight, Paul Ingram of the Tucson Sentinel.

And for his last appearance, Christopher Conover of AZPM News.

Thank you for making time for us, Chris.

Thank you.

And let's start off with what the Tucson City Council did this week, going ahead and decided to make camping in parks and washes illegal, not a new issue, but what changed from June from March when they took it up a few months ago?

And what will it actually mean?

What's it gonna mean to actually ban this?

How's that gonna affect the community?

Well, I mean, quality of life wise, I mean, we're criminalizing being homeless to a degree, but I mean, the city council is saying that they're responding to community needs.

We have seen in the past couple of months a number of fires popping up in washes and abandoned buildings as well, but in a time where it's 108 degrees and nobody even wants to walk from their car into a building, I mean, nobody would be sleeping outside and in a wash if they had anywhere else to be for sure.

So it was a split vote.

I was kind of surprised by how we saw it fall in line, but again, this is a city council saying that they are responding to what voters have been asking for.

Chris, do you know what made the difference?

Three, three vote versus five, one vote?

Or is it hard to figure out?

I think it's hard to figure out, but one of the things that came up during the debate was, okay, fine, we're going to do this, great, do this.

What do we do?

Now you've told people that don't have somewhere to go that, well, you can't go there.

Where do they go?

What are Tucson's options?

Tucson doesn't have options to deal with these unhoused folks.

We need to do something.

Paul, is there a feeling amongst the community, we can't speak for everybody, but some people are obviously genuinely concerned about the unhoused, but others are thinking, wow, I don't necessarily want people roaming in my community.

It was nice to have them be able to use the parks and camp out and whatnot.

Well, yeah, I mean, one thing I think you see is that the people who camp and washes, I mean, there's sort of, there's the tier system that the city has developed.

And the tier system is really like some encampments are fine.

They can be left alone.

They're really not so much trouble.

And in a lot of cases, they need a little bit of services, sometimes just portable bathroom extra things.

And there's other camps that are problematic and there's camps that they remove.

And the city has tried to implement this tier system for the last couple of years.

And this may kind of make that more difficult.

Essentially, they're gonna be put in a position where they're gonna have to push people away from any of these encampments or washes, the incident that they have in complaint.

The big question I think is really what happens to people.

If they're not gonna be in the city, then they're just gonna end up in the county.

Then that pushes the problem to the county's arms instead.

Now the city and county have good relationships.

They have a bunch of programs that they're trying to do to help people.

But this means that maybe city police are gonna need a situation where they have to cite people.

And then what happens when you cite somebody?

I mean, you're citing and releasing them, at which point are you gonna take them to jail?

I mean, they're that's-- Are you gonna fine unhoused people?

Well, and exactly, you're gonna fine, What happens if they don't pay the fine?

What happens if they don't respond to the bench warrant?

You're gonna have this kind of rolling situation where you don't really have any good solutions.

Yeah, Chris, any more thoughts on that?

Well, and we've seen the change also where you can't be standing inside the medians anymore.

And again, it's just pushing it out and pushing the problem to other jurisdictions, but I don't think it's solving the problem.

Now, easy for me to say, I have a house and there's nobody camping in the wash behind my house, which some people understandably have a concern with, but there's still the larger question.

What are we going to do?

Yeah, I mean, and not every voter is for this clearly, as we saw at the end of the meeting, that got quite volatile to the point that they had to end the meeting.

There was quite a large protest and there has been for a while.

If you've driven past Santa Rita Park, which is shut down for improveme right now, it is covered with ribbons in solidarity of its lack of availability for the homeless community.

So it'll be interesting to see what the city council does next.

Paul Cunningham was very vocal that this puts the ball back in their court to find tangible solutions, because otherwise we're going to see people, I mean, dying in the streets, in the streets, instead of where we don't see it.

It's going to be in our faces and hopefully that will prompt people to do something.

It's kind of a problem that when it's in the washes, we don't have to face that ugly reality.

Right, the situation's not getting any better.

I drive down First Avenue every morning coming in and you are seeing more and more people who are obviously unhoused along First Avenue.

Where do they go?

Yeah, Paul, another vote this week.

This was by the Pima County Board of Supervisors, narrowly approving this plan, allowing a California-based developer to build a data center, which it's always good to see more data centers in the desert because of course, we don't have extreme weather conditions, I guess they claim, although it gets kind of hot here.

So mixed feelings around data centers, but why did the board go ahead and approve this?

And do we know a lot about what Project Blue is going to look like?

Well, we know that Project Blue is essentially a server center.

Who's the customer and what that's gonna be used for, we don't know that yet.

A lot of that's been covered under non-disclosure agreements, which of course, I think raises some questions about what this company is actually going to be doing, but there's lots of data centers all throughout the US.

There's a bunch in Phoenix, for example, too.

The big question for these things is always how much power are they gonna use, which tends to be massive, and also how much water they use.

Data centers use water for cooling and there's a big question about how much water they consume, how much water goes back in the system, and how much water just gets evaporated away, or there's a certain amount of coolants that actually pollute the water.

So there's really questions about what that's going to mean in the long term for a really, really big project.

On the other hand, it's going to mean a lot of investment.

There's lots of money involved.

And also there will be jobs for construction and also there'll be some jobs for actually running and maintaining these data centers.

I think that's the interesting thing for me is are these jobs that are gonna be around for a while, and will they pay well?

Part of the agreement was they have to hire, I believe it's 75 people for the data center within a certain amount of time and then there are the construction jobs and all the ancillary things.

But what struck me as I was watching the debate was I've heard so many of these arguments before in southern Arizona, the balance of business versus the environment, be it water or everything.

I thought this is the argument about a mine.

It's the exact same argument.

And I kind of wondered is the data center just the new mine for southern Arizona?

Well, and I'm thinking about the water stuff as well.

Project Blue, I guess, is claiming, at least according to what the board heard, to be water neutral.

So I guess they're trying to get ahead of that.

But does any of us in the desert really think that's possible, right?

Probably not.

And we'll probably never know actually how water neutral they are because that's gonna be included in non-disclosure agreements and whatnot.

But when you think about the amount of water that's used, the amount of electricity, the infrastructure, and we're talking 75 jobs.

I mean, it feels like the trade off should be higher when we're talking about a resource as scarce and valuable as water.

Also, city of Tucson is gonna need to annex the land.

Does that seem like we have any idea if that's a rubber stamp, if this keeps going?

I think because of some of the other topics I'm sure we're gonna hit on the electric side, I think things are going to slow down on this project a little bit, both the approval, because as I'm sure we'll get to TEP asking for a rate increase right after that vote.

And now Supervisor Heinz is saying, let's bring this vote back up again.

And I think the city is probably gonna wait and see what the county does for a minute.

And I think everything's gonna slow down.

So, Caitlin, this is why Chris Conover has been a broadcast professiona for so long.

Because he could read my mind on the segue there.

I think we're all a little bit stunned by a 14% rate hike request.

And the timing of this, so what do you make of that?

Do you think it could slow down the project because of what Supervisor Heinz said?

I mean, I think absolutely.

I think asking that it be discussed again is a sure sign that he might wanna reconsider his vote.

And given that it passed on a slim margin of three to two, it's not going to pass if he is on the other side of that vote.

I mean, and the timing certainly was interesting and probably not a good way to make any friends immediately after the vote to make the announcement.

It was definitely a surprising move.

Well, and Paul Correct me, if I'm wrong, was this 14% proposed hike on just residential customers?

Because that's what I'm not sure about.

Because if it's just residential customers, then I'm thinking if you're having to raise it because you need more electricit for a project that is not residential focused, either way, 14% is a lot.

No, but those things play into each other anyways.

I mean, in a way, it doesn't matter.

I mean, all power comes from the same locations, whether it's commercial or residential.

Yeah, we set slightly different rates.

But we have to keep in mind, I mean, TEP just asked and got a 10% rate just two years ago.

Now they're asking for 14% raise.

I mean, I really was struck, the timing, I don't think could have been worse.

I know that TEP didn't mean to do this.

This wasn't a plan.

This was them, I think, operating in their own silo, trying to figure out how much money they needed and then suddenly putting this out there.

But it really does show.

I mean, all these things are connected.

All the power that goes into Tucson that's provided by TEP and by others really then goes and sets rates for customers.

But it always comes down to a commercial and for commercials, businesses rates are huge, but also for residential customers, especially people who are maybe at the margins who are wondering if they can run their air conditioning tomorrow, 14% increase is going to be mainly the difference between them doing that and not.

Yeah, Chris, if you were a NPR or a PIO, would you have advised them to not put this out right away like that?

I may have told them to wait a little bit on that.

And TEPs had some rough times between the last rate increase, all the stuff about putting the big transmission line through the middle of town.

I might have held back, if possible at all, on this and thought a little bit more about the timing because TEP has said the vote on the data center where they promise not to raise rates and the fact that hours later they were putting out a rate proposal, the two are not related at all.

But for the average person, all they see are the two headlines and it's a tough look for TEP.

Yeah, Paul.

And TEP is also in the middle of asking for its franchise agreement again with Tucson.

And there's a small movement to actually get the city to buy TEP and actually operate it as their own power system, specifically because of the rate increases.

So yeah, I feel like they really managed to stick their foot in it.

So predictions are terrible.

14% gonna go through, will it be approved?

I mean-- Less than that?

A compromise?

If they'd like to stay in business with the city, I think they might have to lower that a little bit.

But who knows?

I mean, and people were really vocal about the data center already.

So if it comes up for discussion again, amidst a rate hike, it's gonna be an exciting call to the audience again.

Caitlin, let me stick with you on this.

So last weekend, same day President Trump celebrated his birthday, same day there was a parade that some would say was successful, others would say the biggest thing ever.

At least one person might say that.

What do you make of the protests we saw in Tucson or a valley and how it related to the rest of the country?

I mean, it looks like there were more people at the protest in Tucson that were at said parade.

But I mean, I think it's tough to get people out in Tucson in triple digit temperatures.

And that wasn't the only protest in Tucson last week.

There was one on Monday, there was one on Wednesday, there was another one on Friday, Tuesday.

I mean, people are coming out every single day.

I think it's a growing discomfort.

We are seeing more people, we are seeing people from demographics.

I don't love that people are maybe risking their health for this, but it's interesting.

One of my reporters talked to a professor here at the U of A that said protest is still an increasingly effective way to prevent the rise of a dictatorship.

So we'll see.

But I do not recall such a time of frequent protest in my life, that's for sure.

No, I think the three of us, I know at least Paul, you and I have been out a couple of times at the Tesla protests.

I mean, I've seen some of your reporters out there, Caitlin, we're seeing more and more, and these are not the five people standing on the corner with a sign, this is thousands and thousands of people.

The interesting thing was we had a discussion in the newsroom before the protest over the weekend about safety, which is not a discussion we used to have, but now we have to have this discussion.

And I said, here's the safety briefing, here's what we do, but I'm not expecting a problem.

Tucson, that does not seem to be our thing.

And thankfully, I think there were two arrests in a minor car accident as part of the caravan.

But other than that, okay, people stood on the sidewalks, they held their signs, they said what they were going to say, but there was no violence or anything like that.

So I think that actually helps their position when we see other places in the nation not having that quiet, peaceful, maybe loud, but peaceful protest.

And I think it's really worth mentioning, I mean, this, yeah, Tucson had essentially three protests just in the Tucson area, but there was also one in Green Valley, there was one in Río Rico, there was one in Sahuarita, there was one in Nogales, there was one in Bisbee.

It was all across the state, there were about 2,000 protests across the nation.

Estimates are wild, but I mean, if you figure H1 had a few thousand people, that's millions of people who came out that weekend specifically to protest against the Trump administration, against the things that the Trump administration are doing.

And there's this combination of things that people are really mad about.

I mean, of course, they were celebrating Flag Day, you saw a lot, of course, lots of American flags, you saw lots of criticism of the Trump administration, you also saw criticism of how he's approached immigration, you saw about taxes, you saw back to the effort about Elon Musk and DOGE, you see lots of these things all combined, I think what's really remarkable is that, yeah, you see people who normally aren't protesting, we kind of have a little core of protesters who we can usually kind of rely on to show up to these things, but this was dramatically different.

I went to the one in Oro Valley, and it was just a dramatically different group than you would see in the typical protests downtown.

You don't see a lot of protests in Oro Valley.

Yeah, exactly.

So impact of this, it sends a message, doesn't it?

It sends a message.

I think the person they're trying to send a message to is a person that feeds off of being disliked just as much as he feeds off of being liked, so I don't know that it will reach those ears, but hopefully it will reach the ears of some other elected representatives who will listen to their constituents and maybe see that people are really unhappy.

In the last time I remember Tucson turning out for a protest in triple digit heat was in 2020 right after George Floyd, and we don't do this a lot, so people are really upset.

Paul, just a couple minutes left in the conversation.

You reported on Fisher, Sand, and Gravel being chosen to build nearly 27 more miles of border wall.

Remind us why we've, most of us at least, have heard of Fisher, Sand, and Gravel.

Well, Fisher, Sand, and Gravel is a construction company.

They do lots of different kind of construction projects, but they've been really intimately involved in the construction of the border wall.

Really specifically, they actually were part of a push to build a private border wall that actually started here in Tucson area, which while they promised to spend millions of dollars building a private wall that was going to be several miles long, they ended up building less than a mile, but Fisher was intimately involved in this project.

It didn't go very well.

They have some erosion problems, let's say.

They were actually sued by the Justice Department, which told them that they had to take care of their private wall for the next 15 years because they're worried it's gonna fall into the Rio Grande.

Fisher was also really involved in lots of construction projects throughout Arizona.

Part of these projects, when they were such a rapid pace through 2020 as the election was happening, the Trump administration raced to build as much border wall as they could.

Fisher, Sand, and Gravel, of course, did as much as they could, and what that meant was is that they tended to not finish projects.

There's lots of chunks of areas where they just kind of left a mess that wasn't cleaned up, that really got cleaned up under the Biden administration who went in and had to remediate a lot of these projects.

Now they've got a new contract.

They have $300 million to spend on building 27 miles of border wall.

Yeah, and Chris I'm guessing the same environmental and wildlife concerns will pop up.

Absolutely, those concerns have not changed.

You talk to the Center for Biological Diversity, who's always on the forefront of that, and they point out things like the Jaguars.

The Jaguars don't recognize the border, but they do see a large wall, and while they are very big cats, getting through that wall is a problem, and there are plenty of pictures of deer and javelina and smaller, even rattlesnakes for some areas of the wall, kind of looking at the wall or going up against the wall, and they can't go back and forth, and that's a big habitat problem.

Caitlin, final thoughts on this?

I mean, I think we knew something like this was gonna happen.

It was inevitable.

It'll just be interesting to see how much progress they make this time around, and how fast they try to do it.

Yeah, Paul, about 20 seconds.

What are we watching for next year?

I mean, I think we really need to see exactly how they're gonna do the wall.

There's been some move to get them to leave certain sections open, specifically to allow wildlife to cross.

We'll see if they make those agreements, whether that happens.

I think that probably will happen, but ultimately, it means that almost the entire Arizona-Mexico border is gonna be sealed off by the end of the next couple years.

Yeah, Paul Caitlin, thank you so much.

Special thanks to this guy, Christopher Conover, for all your help and all your years at AZPM, for those who don't know.

This is your last week.

Thank you for joining us on The Press Room your last week here.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, and still more to come on The Press Room.

We'll talk about what Juneteenth means to the U.S. and to Tucson.

Stay with us.

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Welcome back to The Press Room.

I'm Steve Goldstein.

Thursday of this week marked Juneteenth, which takes us back to 1865, an extremely important day in American history.

With me to talk about it is Larry Starks, president of the Tucson Juneteenth Festival.

Larry, welcome to the press room.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you for having me.

I really appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

Happy Freedom Day.

Before we get into some of the traditions in Tucson, I wanna ask you how significant it was when Juneteenth was recognized as a federal holiday in 2021 when President Biden was in office.

How much did that mean to the African-American community, to the fact that it was gonna be recognized in such a way?

Well, I think it meant a lot to not just the African-American community, but the total community, because it's about resilience, it's about inclusivity, it's about bringing people together.

For me personally, the reason I sit here is because my brother was a staunch supporter of Juneteenth for many years, and actually tried to get Juneteenth to be a holiday in Arizona many years ago.

So for him, he didn't get to see it, but for us, it being recognized even on a federal level, was saying, "Okay, now we can get to educate people about what it really is about."

So how long had your brother been trying this?

For about 15 years.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

So he passed away in 2015, so he wasn't able to see it, even for Arizona, but federally.

But that was his work, because he understood the significance of what Juneteenth was really about.

So Tucson as a community has been marking and celebrating Juneteenth for a lot longer than that.

What are some traditions we should know about how do residents here celebrate Juneteenth?

Well, we celebrate here.

You know, of course, the festival, it's a gathering, a large gathering, but how it started was some residents who were local, but they came from Texas, and they just wanted to continue that celebration that they brought from Texas.

So they brought it here, started out really small, started on the mountain and some other places, saying, "Hey, you know, we have this thing called Juneteenth in Texas."

And they're like, "Well, we didn't know."

So it just started with some real small potlucks and friends getting together, and then someone would say, "Hey, we need to get this bigger, bring the community in a little bit more."

And then in 1970, they actually formed the LLC that became the Tucson Juneteenth Festival Committee.

And how many people approximately attend the festival on a yearly basis?

How many different community activities are there?

So this year, we have over 4,000 people that enjoyed the festival itself throughout the day.

We have eight events this year so far.

So we're growing, and so what my motto is, it's a movement, not a moment.

So people can understand that Juneteenth is not just a moment in time, but understanding the resiliency and how that coordinated throughout.

We have our Gospel Jubilee, we have an art studio tonight, we'll be at the Drawing Studio tonight from two to 8 p.m. Of course, our festival, we have an event at the Catalyst called How I Got Over, we had an event at the Loft Cinema.

So again, it's really just bringing the community together, not just in June, but we have events all year long.

So we're really trying to just bring the community back so then we can educate people about why Juneteenth is so important.

Well, I wanna ask you a little bit more about the holiday.

The word you kept using was resilience, which is obviously incredibly important, but when we look back to when Juneteenth was formed, really a black eye in the history of the United States as far as leading up to that point, what are some other things, what are some general lessons, either historically or from an emotional standpoint, you want the community and the country to think about when it comes to Juneteenth?

I want people to think about, if you were in that same situation where your freedom was delayed for, I mean, this is two years, but how we're believing that you're gonna be enslaved forever for your life, your kids being enslaved forever, they didn't know that they were gonna be freed, and then finding out that you should have been freed two years ago, how would you have felt?

I don't know if myself and my 2025 mindset would be as happy to go celebrate and think about food and different things like that, but they sought the resiliency, that's what I said, the freedom, and say, hey, you know what, let's celebrate this.

Let's go out because they did venture out, they didn't stay, they went to other locations, not just in the United States, but in the country, and then came back to celebrate, to say, hey, we wanna see what's out there and let's come back and commemorate this day of our freedom.

Well, let's talk about a really big event when it comes to the Tucson Juneteenth Festival.

You won a significant prize at Fast Pitch Tucson, and I watched the video, I read a little bit about it.

(audience cheering) I am Larry Starks, the president of the Tucson Juneteenth Festival.

This is a totally volunteer-led organization that has been the cornerstone of the Tucson community for 55 years.

We bring together not just a festival, but programming all year long.

People were extremely excited and impressed by what you were doing.

So what are your next goals and projects there?

Well, what it does, that endowment, what it does for us, it creates some stability.

Because for many years, and a lot of people who came before me fought hard, and long, and scraping the buckets trying to get sponsorships and donations and different things like that, where there were some years where they really, they couldn't hold a festival, or they're coming out of their pocket with money and different things like that.

So what that endowment does though, it says, we're here to stay.

We're not going anywhere.

We're gonna do another 55 years.

And so the younger generation can now see the seriousness of what we're doing.

Our legacy program is really what brought that about.

We have a legacy between our kids between the ages of 16 to 24.

We take them to Montgomery, Alabama at the end of their program, so that they can see where they come from.

They see why we expect them to have certain beliefs, why the history is important, why not just trying to learn things in school, but we have to learn things outside of school so that they can still tell the story years from now.

And that's what that endowment does.

It really, again, what we're looking at is creating community, not just for Juneteenth, but for the NAACP, for the Black Chamber, for all these different entities so that we can get together and the community can see where we are and what we do.

We're not just pitch and hold in any space.

And that leads me to my last question, which is, do you think the Tucson Juneteenth Festival can be a model for other communities to be almost like a best practices situation?

I do, and I'm really hoping that's what it is, so that other Juneteenth festivals can see that it's not just that one day out of the year.

Even for Black History Month, it's not just a month.

We have to have history every month for 12 months out of the year.

I'm hoping that people see that and to expand on it and to be able to educate the community and to bring in, especially the younger generation, because we can't just be the gatekeepers of the information.

We have to give it to them and let them run with it and let them keep expounding on it.

And that's how history keeps repeating is because we don't give the information, but our younger generation, we give it to them, they give it to the next generation, and those stories are holding and they're true.

Terrific.

Larry Starks, president of the Tucson Juneteenth Festival.

Thanks for being here, we appreciate it.

Thank you so much for having me.

And thank you for joining us for this edition of The Press Room from AZPM.

We'll be back again next week.

I'm Steve Goldstein.