Supporters of an initiative that would have raised about $800 million for public safety and social services are headed back to the drawing board after nearly 70% of Tucson voters rejected Proposition 414 in Tuesday’s special election.

Prop. 414 would have increased the city’s sales tax from 2.6% to 3.1% for the next 10 years. This would have brought the total local sales tax within city limits to 9.2%, making it among the highest in the state.

The funds would have been distributed into five categories: affordable housing and shelter, neighborhood and community resilience, enhanced emergency response, technology investments, and capital investment for first responders.

The main divide between voters came from the allocation of funding, with more than 65% going toward public safety investments and the remaining 34% devoted to community resilience programs.

Opponents said they believed significantly more money should be devoted to housing and services and expressed concerns about funding for additional police technology and surveillance, including a new aircraft, drones, and license plate readers.

"We see this election as a referendum on the city’s upside-down budget priorities, in which the Tucson Police Department is showered with funds while social services and housing receive scraps year after year,” said Liz Casey, a member of the No on Prop 414 coalition and a volunteer with the mutual aid group Community Care Tucson.

Casey called the results a “true landslide,” saying the mayor and council need to do “some serious soul-searching as to how they could misunderstand the priorities of their constituents.”

“Tucsonans are clearly struggling, and we sent a message to city leaders: We aren’t going to open our wallets to pay for more policing and surveillance, especially when our community's basic needs are not being met,” Casey said.

The city of Tucson mailed out 305,779 ballots for the all-mail election. As of Wednesday afternoon, 76,480 ballots had been returned, representing about 25% voter turnout, with 128 of 141 precincts reporting results.

Nearly 70% of voters rejected the initiative, with more than 53,000 people voting “no.”

“While I am disappointed in the outcome of Proposition 414, I am grateful to the voters of Tucson and everyone who stood with us in this campaign,” Tucson Mayor Regina Romero wrote in a statement posted to her Instagram account Wednesday. “The challenges in front of us, in the face of hundreds of millions of dollars of reduced revenue from the state’s flat tax and uncertain federal funding combined with Trump’s chaotic economic policies, are a real concern for Tucson families.”

Romero said the issues facing the community, including the opioid epidemic, rising numbers of unhoused individuals, and the affordable housing crisis, are complex, nationwide problems for which there are no quick and easy solutions.

“Voters were clear that Proposition 414 was not their preferred answer, so we go back to the drawing board. The No campaign believes they have a better solution — I say, let’s see it,” Romero said.

Romero and the City Council will discuss the budget during Tuesday’s City Council meeting. She said she, the council, City Manager Tim Thomure, and others are committed to working toward solutions that strengthen the city and create a safe and vibrant community for all.

Thomure said Friday during an appearance on “The Bill Buckmaster Show” that the “vast majority” of the city’s $2.4 billion budget consists of ongoing expenses that will continue regardless of the election outcome.

“The immediate impact would be not a significant change in our level of service, at least for the next year,” Thomure said. “We've been making do with what we have today and the last few years, but there are some areas of stress that are going to get a little more profound over the next year, in the case of our fire service.”

The Tucson Fire Department’s staffing numbers typically hover around its authorized head count of 645 sworn firefighters, Tucson Fire Chief Chuck Ryan said in early December.

“We’re able to respond to calls, we’re able to provide very good service, but we are burning out our firefighters, quite honestly,” Thomure said. “They are getting quite a few more calls per shift than they should be, and that means that not only are response times dropping a little bit, but the burden on the firefighters is increasing.”

Prop. 414’s failure means city officials will also have to reevaluate funding for some programs used to address social services.

“Within a year, we’d also be facing the fact that some of the funding that's been available to do some of the programs we started the last few years, like our Housing First program, which is funded through the American Rescue Plan Act and COVID relief dollars — those grants will start to come to the end of their life,” he said.

According to Thomure, Tucson is facing a $13 million deficit for the next fiscal year.

“We have yet to bring in a budget that I can recommend that is balanced right now,” he said. “It's my job to get the deficit to zero, and we’ll do that — it just becomes a little more challenging, and it also means some choices need to be made.”

Colton Allder is a journalism major at the University of Arizona and Tucson Spotlight intern. Contact him at callder1995@arizona.edu.

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