After being appointed in 1988, Dan Eckstrom served as a Pima County supervisor for 15 years.
Ray Carroll, appointed in 1997, served for almost 20 years.
Richard Elías, appointed in 2002, held office for 18 years.
And Ramon Valadez, appointed in 2003 to replace Eckstrom, held the seat for 17 years.
Once appointed, all went on to win multiple elections and serve for way more than a decade. That’s why the decision the Pima County Board of Supervisors is scheduled to make Tuesday could be big.
They’re poised to pick a replacement for Sharon Bronson, the supervisor serving the west-side District 3 for 27 years, who resigned last month after breaking ribs in a fall at home.
Eight people filed to be candidates to replace Bronson: Jen Allen, April Ignacio, Brian Johnson, Matt Kopec, Sylvia Lee, Joe Machado, Kristen Randall, Edgar Soto.
They’re split about evenly between those who just want to serve out Bronson’s term and leave office next December, without running for the seat, and those who plan to run for the seat in November.
Bronson must be replaced by a Democrat, since that is her party affiliation.
But what kind of Democrat? That’s a potentially consequential choice, especially considering Bronson’s rightward drift in the last couple of years on the board, which made her probably the second most conservative board member after District 4 Republican Steve Christy.
She has surprised fellow board members by, for instance, voting against funding for border water stations, something she previously voted for over many years.
Arizona Daily Star columnist Tim Steller
If the board doesn’t pick a placeholder candidate, it could choose a Democrat who would create a solid new progressive majority for years to come, with the new appointee joining board chair Adelita Grijalva and District 2 supervisor Matt Heinz in this progressive bloc.
They would also have District 1 supervisor Rex Scott, a solid Democrat if not really a progressive, mostly on their side.
Christy, the board’s sole Republican, could become even more isolated. And the Pima County Board of Supervisors, a more moderate political body up until 2020, could look a lot more like the all-Democratic Tucson City Council in its political makeup for years to come.
How to make the choice?
But first they have to come up with a process for selection, which has not always been easy when the board must pick a new colleague. Heinz suggested using ranked-choice voting as a first step in the process this time, to figure out who the top candidates are.
“I think the best, most accurate, the cleanest and the fastest, most-efficient way would be to have a ranked-choice process,” he told me Wednesday.
It also could spare the candidates and the supervisors the angst of repeatedly voting against candidates they like in order to get to a consensus choice.
“I don’t want to be in a position where I have to publicly vote against my second choice,” Heinz added.
Ranked-choice voting is the process, increasingly common around the country, by which voters rank the candidates from best to worst, and the outcome is determined by weighting and compiling those rankings. The result would be a list of candidates from most to least favored by the four current board members
On a bigger scale, ranked-choice voting can be a little complicated, but at this scale it would work quickly to show the supervisors who are the board’s favorites. Then they could go on to the formal nomination of candidates and voting on them.
Grijalva has asked for legal advice as to whether this is possible under law. What I like about it is that it would avoid unnecessary scenarios such as what happened when Ray Carroll was selected to replace John Even in 1997.
He recalled to me last week that it took 27 different motions, some of them with painful impacts, before he was selected. For example, Even’s widow Brenda was nominated by motion, but there was no second to the motion and her nomination failed to even garner a vote — a cruel situation that is better avoided.
In that case, eventually Carroll was chosen through a strange combination: Republican Mike Boyd and Democrat Raul Grijalva voted for him, then clerk of the board Lori Godoshian waded in to cast the winning vote, as is allowed by state law for the replacement of supervisors.
Godoshian played the same role in 2002, casting a deciding ballot for Richard Elias to replace Raul Grijalva when the board was split 2-2 along party lines. Melissa Manriquez, the current board clerk, could be thrust into the same position this coming week.
Or, potentially, the board could do something like it did when Elias died unexpectedly in March 2020. They picked Betty Villegas to serve out Elias’ term, then Adelita Grijalva won the seat in the next election.
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The appointment may boil down to two competing candidates rumored to be the favorites of important figures.
Since Kristen Randall resigned as a Pima County constable in early 2022, the talk around the county has been that she would replace Bronson, either by appointment or by running for the seat. But when I asked Bronson, she declined to name a favorite.
“The district is incredibly diverse,” she noted. “Clearly we need somebody who has an idea of the complexity — somebody who has an idea of how the county is run, somebody with an understanding of the fiscal baskets.”
Adelita Grijalva also decline to name a favorite, but her father, U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva, has endorsed Jen Allen, a newcomer to local politics whose career stretches from running the Tucson-based Border Action Network two decades ago to directing the Arizona ACLU in recent years.
That’s led people like me to deduce that Adelita Grijalva probably favors Allen for the seat, though it’s possible she differs from her father on this.
In fact, she bristled during the Nov. 21 board meetings at accusations by Bronson that she was trying to “rig” the process to put her favored candidate in place.
“I don’t want to be accused of trying to manipulate this process in any way,” she said. “That is absolutely not the case.”
Leftward move likely
Whoever the supervisors choose, the board is likely to move further left, the main question being by how much. When I asked Adelita Grijalva which policies could theoretically be affected by having a progressive majority, she named funding for preschools, affordable housing, and open-space purchases as examples.
But she noted that the new member may simply turn some recent 3-2 votes, in which Bronson and Christy were on the losing side, into 4-1 votes.
Tighter votes could happen during the upcoming budget process, as the board decides how to spend nearly $2 billion. A new progressive majority could be more wedded to the county’s just-passed anti-poverty effort, for example, and direct money that way.
Whoever they choose is likely to lean further left than Bronson did in recent years — the big question is how much.
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