The Pima County Board of Supervisors have rejected a proposal to accept a $1.4 million federal border-security grant, in what appeared to be an entirely politically motivated vote. Supervisor Ramón Valadez later changed his mind, and has asked for a revote on the issue, but his initial stance belies the political motivations behind the original “no” vote.
Valadez and fellow Democrats on the board voted as one to reject the monies on Feb. 6, and the reasons they gave were galling in light of the fact that they had accepted it every single year since 2004, with nary a peep! What could possibly have changed?
Donald Trump. Valadez tried to say that it was about a newfound concern for what the money was being used for. After receiving a memo from Sheriff Mark Napier appealing the decision on Feb. 7, he said the reason for his shift back to supporting receipt of the funds was because the sheriff had clarified what the funds would be used for. “It wasn’t clear to me what those monies were being used for,” he said.
Supervisor Sharon Bronson echoed those “concerns” and implied that the board members had heretofore been derelict in their duties by not really asking a lot of questions about the money and what it was being used for. “We probably should have been paying more attention,” Bronson said.
However, the real truth appears to be that the Democrats are playing to their political base at the expense of the security of the entire constituency. Why?
Trump. Supervisor Richard Elías claimed, like many other Democrats have, at the board meeting where the original vote occurred, that Trump’s enforcement of immigration laws amounted to a militarization of the border. He and the other Democrat supervisors don’t want any funds potentially being used by sheriff’s deputies to enforce federal immigration law.
This is a meaningless talking point. As Napier stated in the memo he sent to the board — the one that apparently change Valadez’s mind — Operation Stonegarden, the program supplying the grant, deals exclusively with border-security issues related to drug- and human-trafficking.
In other words, the deputies, whose overtime pay these funds finance, are not involved in helping with federal immigration issues. After Napier reassured the board that deputies are not primary enforcers of immigration laws, Valadez suddenly decided that the security benefit to more rural areas of the county outweighed his other concerns.
Even if the deputies being financed by Stonegarden were helping enforce immigration laws, they would have been doing it in years past as well, yet board members never seemed to care then. So, this line of argument seems entirely disingenuous. But that wasn’t the only excuse given as to why the funds needed to cease .
County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry said every dollar of overtime requires the county to pay an additional 67 cents into the state retirement fund on behalf of a deputy. Hence, he claimed, there was a serious fiscal problem raised by accepting the money.
This sentiment, echoed by Bronson, is an even more transparent excuse for the more obvious political reasons undergirding the original no vote, because such concerns were never brought up before, either. Napier claims the program is budget-neutral.
The only thing that has changed since the first Stonegarden funds were received 14 years ago is the election of Donald Trump, and it is due to political opposition to him that this vote seems to have been made. The security of the constituents of Pima County should not be a political issue, but alas, it seems this board’s majority decided to make it one.
