Costs, infighting hamper massive transportation plan for Pima County

Progress on a huge 20-year transportation plan to create infrastructure projects across Pima County is being hindered by rising cost estimates and differing views about what should be included.

In 2006, the county’s voters approved a half-cent sales tax to fund $2 billion worth of transportation projects. Revenue came in much lower than expected, however, leaving an estimated $500 million shortfall to complete the projects promised to voters 17 years ago.

That deficit has underscored the inner workings of the committees now drafting the projects for the next Regional Transportation Authority ballot measure that is set to go before voters in the spring of 2025.

The RTA Board, the nine-member governing body of top elected officials from the region’s cities, towns and and tribal communities, told the committees working on the 20-year plan that is known as RTA Next to fit the new proposed projects within the most pessimistic revenue projections.

That means the 37 roadway projects submitted by cities, towns and the county have a $2.34 billion budget to finance major transportation projects and funding buckets for public transit, bicycle and pedestrian enhancements, safety improvements and environmental considerations.

The Citizens Advisory Committee, CAC for short, has worked on prioritizing roadway projects while coming up with funding amounts for each category. On June 26, the 29-member group came to a rare agreement on a proposed draft plan to meet the RTA Board’s July 1 deadline.

But on July 27, the board told the CAC to keep working to finalize a plan by December and established an RTA Next election date of May 2025. Many board members said they worried about the increasing price tags of roadway projects their jurisdictions have identified.

“If we don’t take into consideration the cost of those projects, we’re gonna get halfway through RTA Next, if we’re successful to get it through the voters, and run out of money. And so I think we need to seriously look at what we’re doing,” Marana Mayor Ed Honea said at the board’s meeting.

Some CAC members say they feel their efforts have been stymied by staff interventions and a dueling plan from another committee playing a role in the RTA Next plan. The TMC, or Technical Management Committee, came up with a significantly different plan it brought to the board.

Carmine DeBonis, a TMC member and deputy county administrator for Pima County, said a smaller, ad-hoc group within the TMC formed to create an alternative plan with the hope “coming together would enable the groups to jointly develop a recommended plan, as opposed to each of those groups separately arriving at a recommendation.”

That has yet to happen.

Now, the CAC is going back to deliberations to come up with a plan that meets parameters set by the RTA Board.

“There’s been a lot of frustration on the part of many committee members that we weren’t really driving the process to tell the board what this committee thought,” said CAC Vice Chair Carolyn Campbell. “A few of us took it upon ourselves to filter through the comments that we had heard for five years and take a stab at it. … But I think that proposal that was supported and voted on by the CAC really sets out priorities that we have.”

Escalating costs

Jurisdictions provided initial cost estimates for the projects they want to see in RTA Next in 2019, and some cities and towns say the totals have nearly doubled since then.

Farhad Moghimi, RTA’s executive director, said the cost increases will be handled through an “iterative process.” That means project estimates are continuously refined into more detailed engineers’ estimates and the number of projects, or their individual components, subsequently decreases.

Revenues came in much lower than projected in the current RTA, causing the RTA Board to push $230 million to fund four roadway projects into the new 20-year plan.

The various roadway improvement projects and extra funding buckets for less specific projects have to fit within a budget that not only accounts for the current RTA’s shortfalls but leaves room for the increasing cost of construction over time.

“Without having any clear amounts for what truly is the cost of the projects moving forward, all of this work that has been done, and brain damage that has been done, is worth nothing,” Tucson Mayor Regina Romero said at the board meeting, later adding, “I really don’t think that there is any consensus, not just with TMC and CAC, but even with this board.”

The CAC plan was approved with one last-minute add-on to prevent jurisdictions from having to further cut back on roadway projects: the recommendation to go to a six-tenths tax rate to help make up the funding shortfall for roadway projects.

At the RTA Board’s July meeting, nearly every member expressed disinterest in increasing the tax rate from a half-cent, leading members to approve a motion directing the CAC to revisit its plan under the half-cent tax assumption.

“I got more than one phone call from people saying if you try to raise this, this tax increase, and that’s the death knell of the RTA,” Ted Maxwell, who represents the Arizona State Transportation Board for the RTA, said at the board’s meeting.

Romero, whose representation of Tucson’s needs often puts her at odds with surrounding suburban areas, concurred with keeping the tax rate at a half-cent.

“I just want to be as realistic as possible in terms of what other jurisdictions and their residents can accept,” she said.

Despite the guidance, Maxwell said the two groups drafting RTA Next can build off of their respective frameworks. He acknowledged, however, that “The TMC and the CAC have been working overtime and then some in very difficult environments, and quite often in very contentious environments.”

CAC meetings have been met with confrontations as members from jurisdictions advocate for their region. Some members have pointed to staff interference that prevents progress through harsh oversight and strict open meeting law interpretations.

Dueling plans

The CAC first convened in 2018 to provide input on the new plan. In January 2022, nine new citizen representatives from Tucson joined the committee as part of an alternative response to Tucson’s request for a weighted voting mechanism where RTA Board members get voting powers relative to their jurisdictions’ populations. Instead, Tucson agreed to concessions where it has more representation on the committees drafting the new RTA plan and overseeing the current one.

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The CAC members from Tucson have advocated for the city’s “modernization” approach to regional transportation, which is often at odds with the car-centric transportation projects other regions ask for.

“Many of our projects are not recommending widening the road, but rather focusing on modernization elements,” through projects that enhance pedestrian access and safety measures, Tucson’s Director of Transportation and Mobility Sam Credio said.

Campbell, who was part of the working group that came up with the approved CAC plan, said, “We felt obligated to create a plan that we thought addressed the needs of the different categories other than roads” and that the TMC’s plan “didn’t seem like an accurate representation of what the citizens’ committee had been talking about.”

Campbell also worked on the CAC to craft the original 2006 RTA ballot measure when members were given an overall budget to work with and “we got to craft the plan,” she said. This time around, Campbell said it’s been a much more “staff-driven” process, as the committee has worked within pre-determined funding amounts and has been presented with motions for approval instead of coming up with their own.

“We were presented options that we could either vote yes or no on instead of just giving us an open, blank document,” Campbell said.

Both the CAC and technical committee’s proposals met the $2.3 billion budget the RTA board previously established within a half-cent sales tax framework. The main difference lies in where each committee put funding toward specific roadways and the categories that allow room for more pedestrian-focused enhancements.

The CAC’s plan has roughly $200 million less dedicated to roadway projects than the TMC’s proposal and adds about $233 million to the categories. But the plan didn’t specify which jurisdiction’s projects would be downgraded within the reduced roadways budget to make up the difference.

Tom McGovern, chair of the CAC, said he voted against the plan that passed with an 18-6 vote because it assumed “the jurisdictions themselves would be able to go back and either come up with more of their own money or re-scope those projects in order to squeeze everything down into that smaller budget. … That’s not really reasonable.”

The TMC consists of administrators, public works officials and private sector members. The group convened an ad-hoc committee tasked with reducing project funding for RTA Next roadway projects by $289.1 million by whittling 108 roadway projects into 37.

The group came up with a draft framework of the next RTA before the CAC voted to adopt its proposal in June. The alternate plan kept the transportation-related funding buckets at roughly the same percentage of total RTA funding allocated to each category as the first RTA.

The RTA board told the committees in November to divvy up the categorical funding in the same proportions as a “starting point.” DeBonis from the TMC said conversations about the categories within the ad-hoc group “have been a bit more general and have been outshined … by the discussion on the roadway element.”

But the CAC’s plan, members say, more closely aligns with the guiding principles it established that focus on “providing equitable services and equitable growth” and “addressing the impacts of climate change.”

“We stayed within budget trying to balance the general parameters that the board put up while trying to create something different, that’s more timely for our region than what we have been presented, with that copy-paste of RTA one,” CAC Member Amanda Maass said.

Give and take for Tucson

Another sticking point between the groups is a bus rapid transit route for Tucson from the Sun Tran Tohono Tadai Transit Center to the Downtown Ronstadt Center. Credio said it would be part of a “phased approach to implementing more high capacity transit in the city of Tucson.”

The proposed transit corridor would operate in its own right of way but wouldn’t stop as frequently as a typical bus service, as “the idea is that you’re trying to move a lot of people in a much quicker fashion,” Credio said.

The CAC earmarked $70 million in its plan for the transit project. Tucson anticipates this would serve as a local match to get federal funding for the entire project, according to Credio. The goal is to group it into the transit element on the ballot in the same way the downtown street car was partially funded in the current RTA.

But while the TMC and its ad-hoc group discussed the project, it wasn’t included in the draft plan. DeBonis said members indicated the “conversation should be continued.”

The city has yet to iron out the details of a bus rapid transit plan, but Romero said at the board meeting, “Without a high capacity transit project for the city of Tucson, there’s going to be members on my council that will not support the RTA Next.”

While the city is insistent on the bus rapid transit project, it restructured other projects in order to make up the $289.1 million the ad-hoc committee had to cut from roadway projects.

Tucson agreed to reduce funding for some of its projects while shifting two roadway projects — La Cholla Boulevard from West Starr Pass to West Ajo Way and East 22nd Street from South Alvernon Way to South Camino Seco — to improvements within the categorical buckets of safety and active transportation.

The city also cut $17 million from construction of a two-lane bridge over the Santa Cruz River on West Drexel Road in anticipation of federal funding to supplement the project, according to Credio. Tucson also reduced funding for projects on South 12th Avenue, North Stone Avenue and West St. Mary’s Road, totaling about $138 million worth of concessions.

Credio said the city “took the onus on ourselves” to come up with the savings, as RTA staff previously presented a plan that cut several high-priority Tucson projects.

The transportation director said he’s not concerned about rescoping the projects, as “we preserved the most important elements of those projects, which is really improving safety along those corridors.”

Despite the differing priorities of the nine jurisdictions advocating for projects within RTA Next, Credio has faith the entities can work together to come up with an agreeable plan.

“The needs of Oro Valley and Marana are different than the needs of the city of Tucson, different from the needs of Pima County,” he said. “And when you’re putting together a regional plan, you just need to be okay with that.”