Collaborating on issues of homelessness, drug use and increasing public safety were top of mind during a recent combined meeting of city and county leaders.
Last week's joint meeting of the Tucson City Council and the Board of Supervisors was the second since November, providing the pair an opportunity to discuss ways the two governments can improve community safety and address issues stemming from homelessness.
Officials from each jurisdiction laid out their most recent safety plans: the Safe City Initiative, which Tucson Mayor Regina Romero rolled out in October, and the One Pima Initiative, presented by Supervisor Andrés Cano and adopted by the county board in November.
Tucson's Safe City initiative seeks to leverage law enforcement action into areas with high rates of homelessness, crime and public nuisance issues, like public drug use. Its goal is to get more people into treatment and temporary housing.
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Pima County's One Pima initiative aims to address public safety matters with expanded treatment and recovery sites for substance use and improve the condition of public spaces it manages, like of the Chuck Huckelberry Loop. The initiative also seeks to expand the county's response to the opioid crisis. Â
Liz Morales Morales, the city's assistant manager, zeroed in on the efforts with the immediate needs of homeless people, like temporary shelters and the STAR Village, the city's safe-sleeping site. She also pointed to ongoing efforts to clear homeless camps, with both service agencies and police working together.
Police and community groups have collaborated on several efforts to clear-out homeless camps in the city and get people who live their into treatment.
The recently-released Safe City initiative centers on six priorities with measurable targets for each. Those include increasing access to services to help with homelessness, strengthening anti-violence and intervention efforts and improving emergency response times, among others.
Under the initiative, Tucson police have so far conducted 13 "focused deployments," making contact with 363 people. It resulted in 328 arrests, most of which were cite-and-release.
Officials have been able to place 29 people into shelters, get 26 people to accept drug treatment services and give 15 medically-assisted treatment referrals. The city also cleared 53 encampments through the process.
Steve Holmes, the county's deputy administrator,  focused on county services that have tried to address “root causes†in dealing with homelessness issues. That includes emergency rental assistance to avoid evictions; the Pima County Transition Center, which assists people released from jail, in an attempt to reduce recidivism rates; and the Sobering Alternative for Recovery (SAFR) Center, a medically-supported space providing substance-use treatment.
Supervisor Steve Christy said that while treatment is a "very important piece of the whole picture," addressing crime was the impetus of a lot of the programs and services discussed during the meeting. Christy said enforcement is something the two governments should focus more on when highlighting results.
In response, Mayor Regina Romero pointed to the "real good data" the city is getting as a result of STAR Village, the safe sleeping site in midtown.
Tucson and Pima County leaders recently touted collaborative efforts in addressing issues related to homelessness, drug use and increasing public safety.
City leaders, in rolling out the Safe City Initiative draft plan, said about 7% of those who used STAR have gotten into permanent housing while 4% have been moved into temporary housing. Additionally, an evaluation of the four months before and after STAR Village's opening done by the city showed that the number of "incidents" reported to Tucson police in a one-mile radius around the safe sleeping site dropped by 35%.
Still, Christy said, it is important that conversations in the joint meetings center on efforts to address crime.
"There are many more categories, many more areas of criminality that are really affecting the livelihoods and the quality of life of the community in Pima County, and it's really important, I think, if this is going to be a success, and if we're going to tout all of the treatments and all the programs and all of the great recovery things, which is very important, that we need to do it in the context of why it's there in the first place. It's because of crime," Christy said. "The burglaries, assaults, thefts, auto thefts. There's a whole host of categories, and I know you're talking to STAR village, but that's just one little square mile."
"The criminality element is much more pervasive," he said.
Holmes also touted the county's efforts to fund affordable housing projects. Since 2022, the board has approved about $20.9 million in funding for affordable housing projects, which will create a total of 1,857 affordable housing units.
Councilwoman Nikki Lee said the city-county partnership is going to be extremely important in addressing these issues in the future, as the city deals with tighter budgets.
"Just to be completely honest, we are really struggling, and we are going to have really difficult conversations about programs that we have built that at above-and-beyond core services — responding to 9-1-1 calls, filling potholes, keeping our parks maintained — that we're going to have to have support from the county to help us carry, because we won't be able to carry that weight," she said. "I feel like our capacity in some of these spaces is going to be extremely challenged in the near future, and I know that the partnerships and the work together is going to have to continue and strengthen for us to all work together and keep addressing the community's concerns that we hear everyday."
Pima County and the city are strong in areas like field-based harm-reduction efforts, as well as coordinated engagement between the jurisdictions and their nongovernment partners to reach people in need, Pima County Health Department director Theresa Cullen said in a presentation. But, she noted, gaps are still present.Â
The two governments need better continuity of care for people struggling with substance use, she said, noting a lack of capacity for stabilization and step-down care, among other gaps.
However, Cullen said the two governments have a unique opportunity because of the 2024 decision to pool their opioid settlement funds.
"The vast amount of jurisdictions where there is a large city and a large county separated their funds," she said. "This is very unique in the United States. It remains unique."
