By Charles Borla
The Arizona Daily Star
TUCSON, Ariz. — Tucson officials are weighing cuts to several departments to deal with a budget deficit as the fiscal year comes to a close.
One potential cost-saving measure in particular has some council members concerned: closing two Tucson Fire stations, near the University of Arizona and the state prison.
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City staff already cut the looming budget deficit from $28.9 million to $16.8 million since the council’s last meeting in March, said Anna Rosenberry, assistant city manager and chief financial officer, in a memo ahead of Tuesday’s meeting.
Some potential cuts currently on the table include a hiring freeze across more than a dozen departments, including Tucson Fire, the city’s HR and IT departments, the City Attorney’s Office, city court and more.
The city’s fiscal year begins on July 1 and spans through the following June. The City Council will be presented a recommended budget during its next meeting and will approve a 2026-2027 fiscal year budget in June. The city is required to pass a balanced budget each year.
Though the idea would potentially save the city money, the fire station cuts wouldn’t work practically, said Clayton Black, president of the Tucson Fire Fighters Association. The fire department has already cut so much out of its operating budget since 2009, he said, “that we really have nothing left to cut.”
“Just go back, in ’07, we had close to 680 personnel. We ran about 60,000 calls. Now we’re at 660 and we ran 105,000 calls last year,” he said. “Strategically, taking those trucks out and having other resources come from a longer distance, that’s not reasonable for public safety, and it’s not reasonable for our firefighters, because they’re already overworked.”
For instance, Black said, Tucson Fire’s Station 5 ran more than 5,000 calls last year when “it’s not even safe to run 3,500 calls.” Station 3 last year, one of the two up for closure, ran about 7,300 calls alone last year, he said.
As far as reducing overtime pay goes, Black said, the move could help reduce some of those costs. But it would be attacking a symptom of the overall problem, not addressing the root issue, he said.
“That means that’s 7,300 calls that other trucks in the area are going to have to pick up. ... As of today, we’re at 624 people. We do have 30 graduating next Thursday on the 16th. However, I’ve got seven people leaving this month, four to resignations and three retirements this month alone. In the next two years, half our department is retirement eligible,” he said. “We’re still doing mandatory overtime at least a couple times a week right now. We’ve been doing this for years of, we call people in that don’t even want to work, they’re not available, they don’t want to be available, and we’re making them come to work because we’re so short-staffed.
“So yes, overtime will go down because we would have those extra swing personnel, but less people would be putting in for overtime because they’d be burned out from the call load. So I don’t even think it would really affect anything, as far as, it’s not going to save money,” Black said.
Mayor Regina Romero said she would like to “send letters to the state prison system and/or the governor” and to University of Arizona President Suresh Garimella in hopes the state and UA will contribute towards operations at those fire stations.
Thomure told the council that the state and the university aren’t making any contributions “in any way that’s sufficient to cover the cost” of operating those two fire stations.
Councilwoman Nikki Lee said the city budget won’t get her vote if there’s a reduction in fire stations but not a reinstatement of bus fares. The council has pushed to keep the city’s transit system free for riders since the COVID-19 pandemic, and the question of reinstating fares has been a point of contention for many in the city in recent years.
“My biggest desire is to see a recommendation of reinstating fares. That’s $8.5 million after operating costs that would be coming in, and it will take a long time to implement that,” Lee said. “So my idea is that, when we sit here a year from now, we would have implemented things and we would be in a position to realize some of that revenue before we start closing fire stations.
“I’ll just be very honest, I’m not going to vote for a budget that involves cutting fire stations and closing fire stations, but not reinstating bus fares. So again, we have a huge general fund subsidy for the transit system, and we need to get that into a much more balanced area.”
Paul Cunningham, the other east-side council member, was in support of Lee’s sentiment, as the fire department is already struggling with service delivery due to staffing strains.
“The idea that we have to propose taking two fire stations offline after we picked up 105,000 calls last year, which was the most ever, is very unfathomable to me,” he said. “As far as the transit piece goes, I actually think that free transit makes a lot of sense if more than 20% of our commuters use the bus every day, it would totally make sense. But right now, it’s not that many. It’s not even 5%, or you could argue it’s 5%, but it’s not 20.”
One cut that was being looked at by city staff was a reduction of hours at Tucson’s public pools, but a unanimously approved motion by Councilman Kevin Dahl stopped that from happening.
Councilwoman Selina Barajas wanted to make sure the city’s recreation centers don’t face cuts either, but Romero stopped her from tacking that onto Dahl’s motion, saying she was concerned about the council “starting to remove (options) one at a time.”
“We have very little options to move forward. I would say that we allow some flexibility to how we move from now until we arrive at a budget,” Romero said. “We’re getting ready to start the pools, the swim season, and so I can understand (wanting to keep funding intact), but if we start removing things from the possibility of taking a look at and being flexible, then I would be very, very concerned.”
A hiring freeze may be implemented for a number of city departments, but department directors may also look to enact a hiring “frost,” Thomure said, “where you’re not eliminating positions but you are very strategic about what you fill and how you fill it, and how long you wait to fill a position to accrue savings to a specific target.”
Council member Lane Santa Cruz wondered if the city could impose an across-the-board percentage reduction by department “and let each department kind of figure out how to adjust their budgets.” Thomure said that since much of each department’s budget is tied up in personnel, there’s very little departments can cut in terms of “capital investment” or non-personnel budget pieces.
The city’s current budget, which the City Council approved in June last year, included $23.6 million for employee raises. Those pay raises will remain intact despite any cuts to the budget, Thomure said.
"(The budget) is built upon a few key objectives that the mayor and council have outlined for that we’ve taken as assumptions ... one is the employee compensation not being an optional part of budget development but a core value,” he said. “When we talk about the (upcoming) budget and it having a deficit, that is in part inclusive of including a significant step, year two of investment in employees to address pay equity issues ... that is not something that we’ve put on the table for consideration per se. We’ve put it on the table as a given in the budget.”
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