The following is an original production of AZPM News.

Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos survives a crucial vote by the Board of Supervisors what's next for his leadership in the department.

Looking at the facts behind a pneumonia outbreak in a Tucson neighborhood and how Arizona lawmakers could respond to pressure for passing a new state budget.

All that and more on The Press Room and it's coming up next.

[Music] Thank you for joining us this week on The Press Room.

I'm Tony Perkins and we've got a panel of journalists ready to discuss the week's major headlines in Southern Arizona.

From AZ Luminaria we have Yana Kunichoff.

John Washington writes for the Lookout.

Tim Steller with the Arizona Daily Star and L.M.

Boyd with Arizona Public Media, AZPM News.

Let's start off with Sheriff Chris Nanos, and he was on the verge of losing his job.

A big Pima County Supervisors vote, but he kept his job but the decision was lopsided.

L.M.

why was that the case?

Yeah so anyone covering this tuning into this peripherally, I think the biggest takeaway is Sheriff Chris Nanos is still Sheriff Chris Nanos and it's impossible to really just recap the meeting without getting into the last few months, even the last few years of context.

To put this in perspective the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie really put Nanos in an international spotlight with intense scrutiny and it resurfaced a lot of old headlines about leadership controversies and with reporting from Stephanie Murray at the Republic we see that his employment record with El Paso Police Department does not exactly match what's on his resume or what he has said in sworn depositions, and initially we had Supervisor Matt Heinz really leading this effort to explore whether the board could invoke this old law to compel him to provide sworn testimony and clear this up and potentially remove him from office if he didn't comply.

So ultimately on Tuesday the board voted not to do anything about removing Nanos.

Supervisor Steve Christy proposed to vacate the position that failed after nobody seconded it and then Christy recused himself so that passed yeah 4-0 and we're learning that that was likely based off of legal counsel.

Tim, Nanos is still really unpopular with a key constituency, the Pima County Deputy's Organization.

Yes.

How important is their support?

Well I mean it causes discord in an organization when the rank and file is not in tune with the leadership.

It's not unusual that a police union is angry at the police chief, or in this case the sheriff and that is the case now with the Pima County Deputy's Organization.

But the fact is you know they don't want Nanos in that position and it doesn't seem like most of the board wants Nanos in that position but what they came to terms with at this meeting is there's really not much they could do about it.

He would have had to like completely block their effort to get testimony from him.

There was just no, basically they blinked, the board blinked they wanted him out but they weren't willing to take the risks to do it.

Yana, L.M.

mentioned this also, the Nancy Guthrie disappearance is still unsolved, 100 days now.

Mother's Day was a chance for the Tucson media to revisit this case.

How much damage does this continue to do to Nanos and his department?

Yeah, I mean I do think that this has created a level of pressure where obviously as L.M.

said we're quite a while into people raising concerns about Sheriff Nano's about some of his actions, efforts from the county board to think about like what would oversight of another elected official look like, but I think that Nancy Guthrie's disappearance put a level of national pressure on him and I think just really turned up the dial on all that.

So to me it's hard to imagine that he would sort of be in this hot seat at the Pima County Board of Supervisors without what was happening with Nancy Guthrie or without some of that broader context.

John, what's next?

Yeah well I think it's important to lay out exactly what the supervisors did.

They did not vote to vacate the position but they did vote to refer potential charges of perjury to the state attorney general Kris Mayes and this is the second time that conduct by Nanos has been referred to Kris Mayes in about a year.

They've also contacted the U.S.

Attorney in the past and there have been multiple ways that they have, not just the supervisors, but different community members have tried to push Nanos out of office.

There's an ongoing attempt at a recall.

They've been pushing for his resignation.

Again multiple referrals to the state AG and I think it gets to this question is what is the difference between holding office and fulfilling the duties of office?

He has been able to weather these storms but is just surviving enough at this point.

I mean what is he actually doing?

What is he hanging on to here?

And there are real consequences for him.

If he is convicted of perjury he would likely lose his pension.

So there are, there's a lot still up in the air.

I think the critiques haven't stopped and I don't see them stopping either.

After the vote to refer him to the attorney general's office, supervisors basically took turns offering pretty scathing critiques saying that there is a major crisis of confidence in the department.

Andrés Cano, one of the supervisors, said that he was recalling the lack of leadership and the disaster in the Maricopa Sheriff's Department under Joe Arpaio and for any Pima County democrat to be compared to Joe Arpaio in the SB 1070 era is quite the blow.

On the other hand, I mean, any effort to push him out really rests now on this single strand which is whether he lied by saying that he had not been suspended when he was deposed in December.

He says in retrospect that he understood it to be a question about his term in the Pima County Sheriff's Department and he has not been suspended there but he had previously, 40 years ago in the El Paso Police Department.

So you know he may not have the support and I agree he doesn't, but you know efforts to push him out, he was elected you know, so efforts to push him out rest on very difficult, you know, legal terms.

And I'll also just add, so in those statements that the supervisors gave, they really called on Nanos to step up and work to restore trust.

Checked in with the Sheriff's Department spokesperson this morning, Thursday morning, and I'm told that Nanos actually sat down with representatives from all five of the labor organizations to really figure out how he can work toward doing that.

All right let's move on to reporting of health issues and the Hantavirus cases have struck on board a cruise ship.

A lot of dramatic pictures of people in hazmat suits as if it was COVID 2.0.

Tim what are you seeing in the coverage of this latest public health story?

Well I mean there's a lot of fear that you hear people expressing that there will be this, this will be the next pandemic that you know where the government tries to shut down the country.

I think that's exaggerated.

I mean this is not similar, it does not spread in the same way that the COVID-19 virus did but you know people naturally have fear.

I mean we've had this in Arizona before too.

It's not, it's not completely new so I mean I wouldn't want to poo-poo it but on the other hand it doesn't strike me as that significant.

Right.

The University of Arizona is one of different health organizations reporting that cases of Hantavirus in the west happened in the Four Corners region.

Yana, is this a big concern or just a lot of hype for us in Arizona?

The way I understand it is that there is kind of a high level public health fear around this.

I think it shows to me that we're kind of still so firmly in our post-COVID era there's a lot of fear.

I think there's also not a lot of trust of public health officials.

COVID happened under the first Trump administration so I think some of those similarities I think are notable and also I think there's a reality that we live somewhere that healthcare access is just not always assured for many of the people that live in our state for a lot of, a lot of reasons we can discuss more about.

John, is this a test of how we write about public health issues using the words 'outbreak' and 'pandemic' in the post-COVID era?

I think so.

I think we need to be really careful.

I mean we have lost the trust of our readers and listeners and you know there's one virus is the actual virus and the, you know, it's the Hantavirus in this case or one of the COVID strains and the other virus is the distrust in public health officials is the gutting of public health services, is the lack of insurance, is the systemic is like lack of care throughout our society especially in Arizona and you know we've seen people who have just not been able to maintain levels of care and at the same time they don't know what to do about vaccines about where they can access basic, you know, doctors so I think it's our responsibility to be very careful here to make sure that we understand as well as we can what this virus potentially means and report as factually as we can.

All right, L.M.

you've done stories about measles and pneumonia and our reporting on public health has maybe a different kind of impact post-COVID.

You're doing a report for our program, Arizona Illustrated on PBS 6 coming up looking, at what people are going through in rural parts of Arizona to get quality health care especially with the cutbacks in federal policy.

What are you finding out?

Yeah so I think this, you know concept all started when we were reporting on the Medicaid cuts and starting with the bigger picture: Medicaid in Arizona is run through the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, also known as AHCCCS.

About two million Arizonans rely on AHCCCS and and this is like low-income families, children, pregnant women, seniors in long-term care, people with disabilities but with the changes that came from HR1 or the One Big Beautiful Bill Act there are going to be new work requirements for adults in Medicaid.

More eligibility checks, changes to the provider tax system and that means fewer Arizonans getting coverage and impact on rural hospitals since Medicaid makes up a large part of their payer mix.

So there were, there were a lot of questions about how these cuts would specifically impact rural communities.

My secondary beat is to cover Cochise County so I specifically looked at Cochise County and learned that this region is dealing with labor shortages, a lot of chronic health issues, a lot of what I what I hear health professionals say is social determinants: so lack of transportation, lack of income to to pay medical bills and these are all issues that the Rural Health Transformation fund is hoping to address and that that is a portion of the HR1 bill.

We're going to take a look at a part of a segment from your reporting on Arizona Illustrated.

What are we going to see in this clip?

Yeah so the Rural Health Transformation fund that is going to give Arizona $167 million for this next fiscal year and so I wanted to talk to people on the ground and get a sense of what they are dealing with what obstacles they face and any hope that they have that this this program could offer.

So I spoke with Dr.

Darlene Melk.

She's the chief medical officer of Chiricahua Community Health Services and that's a federally qualified health center that operates in Cochise County.

She's also a pediatrician so she alternates traveling to various clinics throughout Cochise County in order to meet patients where they're at and sometimes that means three-hour commute and talking to her she, she spoke about how specialty care is really rare in her region.

She's typically the one giving referrals to patients but then the the specialists that those patients need are going to be in Tucson or Phoenix and that's a long drive from somebody in Douglas where Dr.

Melk lives or Willcox which is where one patient lives that I, that I also spoke with.

There is going to be a delay in care especially with our adult population.

I would anticipate they're not going to come in unless they're really sick and often that means the disease is very advanced.

Many of the clinics and hospitals operate on one-to-two percent fiscal margins and this will put a great deal of stress.

Ten to twenty percent of the people that take care, that they take care of no longer have a source of payment for their health insurance and and for the type of services they provide.

When you want news that matters to you, turn to AZPM News.

Your voice, your news.

AZPM News at news.azpm.org.

And you can see L.M.

Boyd's reporting on this issue on Arizona Illustrated.

That's coming up at 6:30 p.m.

on Sunday on PBS 6.

John in the before times before COVID, rural health care concerns were really concentrated in Arizona in the Native American communities.

That's still the case but are we sort of losing track of that now?

Are we losing track of the, you know, cases in the Native American communities?

Well I mean they are under-resourced and underfunded still so I would say we're maybe still trying to pull ourselves out of those before times and it certainly does come to a question of what the federal government is going to do with funding and as well as the state legislature which is a real battle that we're seeing right now in the state capitol.

Okay sticking with public health, L.M.

you also did a story on here in Tucson the Rocking K community.

They had a pneumonia event recently?

Well yes, and I don't, I wouldn't call it a pneumonia event or outbreak or whichever, I, to honor what John eloquently said about being very careful about the wording that we use.

We do know that there was like a respiratory illness cluster residents in the Rocking K master plan community which is southeast of Tucson and within Pima County lines a few of them began raising alarms about what they described as this this cluster and some residents I think I believe they spoke to KOLD, talked about how they were hospitalized with bacterial pneumonia.

The Pima County Health Department did confirm to me that they're receiving these complaints and they're investigating but they cannot link these cases or confirm that it's all pneumonia.

They also pointed to heavy construction dust in the area and I when I drove out there I saw a lot of construction and a lot of dust and there's also apparently a large amount of pigeons and they are linking the presence of like the pigeon population could be causing respiratory illnesses in humans which, yeah, that gives me the heebie jeebies but... But they are they were very careful to say that they have, they're not confirming this is an outbreak of pneumonia and there's no direct link so at this point there's no official evidence but it's you know always something to to be mindful of and monitor.

All right let's switch over to politics now and one of the top signs of the approaching election season has to do with signage and we're seeing those political signs going up in the busy intersections around Tucson right about now.

Primary election is coming up in July and Yana there was a political debate this past week between candidates for the department, or Superintendent of Public Instruction.

You were there at the debate what did you see?

Yeah I'll just talk a little bit about the Democratic candidates.

I actually covered education at the last Superintendent of Public Instruction election so from Kathy Hoffman to Tom Horne and I think what really struck me and I think the candidates Teresa Leyba Ruiz was a longtime teacher, former president of Glendale Community College and Brett Newby, who's a behavioral analyst and has worked with children with autism.

I think they're talking about the ESA program the empowerment scholarship accounts and then also the teacher shortage.

What really stuck out to me, I think that if either of those candidates wins they are coming to an Arizona that is so different from before Tom Horne took office.

The ESA right now is a one billion dollars annually so if we thought that four years ago or however many years ago at the last election there was questions about funding in Arizona that were teacher shortage issues were now facing kind of a radically altered financial landscape and so I thought that was just a really a really interesting space and one that I'll be watching closely.

Tim, where will education land in front of voters' minds when it comes time to cast ballots in July?

Certainly you know the economy is going to be number one, where is education going to be?

I mean education among state voters on state issues education perennially ranks high.

People want to do something about what they see as a lacking educational system that we have in Arizona.

The thing that we've done to a large extent is liberalize it in terms of allowing funding charter schools having ESA accounts basically allowing the the old district system to break down and having some other ideas flourish in its place but you know I think people's broad opinions of Arizona education are that it's not great you know it's not it's not it's very mixed of course but it's on average not up to where it should be.

John what about immigration?

Yeah I mean I just question the usage from flourish there I mean I get what you're saying like there's been a a preponderance of these new types of programs but we are still I think 49th or 50th in per pupil spending and the waste and fraud in the ESA program has been devastating to public schools and people aren't certainly aren't ready to throw in the towel and there's people who are really dedicated to this and trying to fight to to uplift public education but it is a very steep climb.

In terms of education or, sorry, in terms of immigration I think what we've seen a change a little bit at least an outward change in how immigration enforcement is taking place in the interior of the United States it is not we are not seeing these sort of outlandish spectacles of violence that we saw in Minneapolis earlier this year or late last year and yet the number of arrests are are staying apace in fact in some jurisdictions they are increasing and yet it's just flying under the radar and we have as you know constituents as the greater public we suffer from political amnesia often if things aren't in front of our face we very quickly forget about it so it has yet real impacts on our community members I think that there are isolated cases where it is very much still fore of mind but I think that in others it's it's sort of dropped off at a level of importance right now.

Okay state gaming officials came out with a surprising report this week an actual decrease in the amount of money Arizonans are wagering in March of this year versus last year that number is 836.9 million dollars, that's a drop of 5.7 percent from March of 2025.

Tim does that say more about how we feel about the economy or is there something else?

I mean maybe we finally hit saturation I mean it's almost incredible to imagine you said 836.9 million is what Arizonans bet in legal sports gambling last month and that's a decrease you know for that's essentially, you know, we're down from near a billion dollars.

It's a huge issue especially if you're around young people especially if you're around young men but you know across society gambling, sports gambling since it was legalized has really taken hold of society.

There's a lot of money in it the figures that that the gaming department put out said there have been 30, almost 34 billion dollars in wagers placed since, in total since the gaming system began here in 2021 Arizona has taken in 180 million dollars in fees that is the equivalent of taxes on these bets so what that comes down to and we should understand when they legalize sports gambling, you know the argument was well we'll tax it, kind of like with marijuana we'll tax it we'll make some money off of it etc.

It's not nearly taxed to the extent that marijuana is, the the rate if you just take the 180 million that we've made out of 40 billion in wagers that's less than a 1 percent in fees that we've taken.

Governor Hobbs' budget proposed raising the the percentage from 10 to 45 percent and the republican budget that was that they just passed and she just vetoed did not include that so that issue of our level of fees, level of taxation on bets remains kind of unresolved.

Now we want a chance to ask each of you what stories you're looking ahead to in the next weeks to months ahead going into the summer, John, there is a religious freedom themed bill that's creating controversy in the legislature.

What's happening there?

There sure is yeah this year we've seen the legislature I think maybe we could say weaponizing religion in different forms there's been a spate of Islamophobic bills there has been an attempt to inject religious education to public school and this latest bill that is proposed would outlaw religious protests against religious activity and the problem that critics see is that religious activity is so vaguely and broadly or ill-defined in the bill that it could be used to prosecute, potentially convict people who are protesting.

First Amendment, they exercise their First Amendment speech, and protesting against what could be a bible thumper on the street and potentially even targeting folks who are protesting anti-abortion movements.

Or there was, Trump came and and spoke at a church in Phoenix.

If you were to protest that could you potentially now be convicted of a crime if this bill passes.

Sources are saying that Hobbs is thinking about actually signing the bill but we'll see how that plays out.

Yana, what do you have coming up?

I'm right now, I'm thinking a lot about heat and utility bills.

I'm writing about the TEP rate case, so I'm working on an explainer about that which could, um, depending on how it's resolved people's bills could go up 14 percent.

And then TEP is also asking for a one percent in rate increase moving forward as an alternative way to just to basically count how rates are decided and I think that that would be huge.

A lot of the communities I write about people spend a huge portion of their income trying to pay their bills.

I write a lot about mobile home communities so I'm thinking about this summer and what it looks like to afford to live in this this community for a lot of people I write about.

Tim, what's on your calendar?

Well, I'm looking back at like two years ago or so when there was a pretty significant protest movement on the University of Arizona campus regarding the war in Gaza and that sort of thing and it disappeared or largely disappeared, diminished in the last two years and I'm looking into why.

L.M?

Yeah so I am going to continue covering the rural health beat.

I'm specifically looking at maternity health.

Maternity wards are often the first on the chopping block when hospitals are looking to cut costs because maternity wards are so expensive to run and we know that we've seen some closures in Southern Arizona so I want to see if the burden...I shouldn't say burden, but I mean, the the privilege of assisting a woman give give birth is falling on emergency personnel, or doulas or midwives so we'll be looking at that and then like I said earlier, my secondary beat is Cochise County.

I recently spoke with the the lead, sorry the manager for the Copper Queen Library in Bisbee.

They recently lost out on $650,000 in potential grant funding and they suspect it's because they've, they've hosted a couple drag events out of the thousands of events that they've hosted in the last five years.

So we are going to be looking at what that means for the community.

All right well then that'll do it for The Press Room.

Thanks to our guests, Yana Kunichoff with AZ Luminaria, John Washington from Lookout, Tim Steller from the Arizona Daily Star at L.M.

Boyd from AZPM News.

I'm Tony Perkins.

For all the staff and crew at The Press Room, thanks for being with us.

We'll see you next week.