Former Tucson city manager Ortega tapped to run RTA

The Regional Transportation Authority wasn’t without a boss for long: Just 11 days after narrowly voting to fire longtime chief Farhad Moghimi, the members of the RTA Board unanimously agreed to hire Mike Ortega, who stepped down as Tucson’s city manager last year.

A year and a half ago, while still working for the city, Ortega told the City Council it would be “fiscally irresponsible” for Tucson to support the RTA Next plan for 20 more years of road spending as it stood then.

Monday, he told the Tucson Sentinel he wasn’t yet familiar with the details of the latest draft plan.

“I don’t know the details of the current plan on the table, so I don’t know the details of it,” Ortega said. “I’ve not been following it that closely, so after I have an opportunity to look at it, I’ll be happy to comment on it.”

Ortega said he saw the job as a chance to help the community.

“I’m always up for helping,” he said. “And you know, if there’s something that I can bring to the game to help out, then I’m certainly interested in doing that.”

Seven members of the board voted to make Ortega the interim executive director while they work out a process for a permanent hire. The representatives for the Pascua Yaqui Tribe and Tohono O’odham Nation didn’t take part in Monday’s special meeting.

They had ousted Moghimi in a 5-4 vote on June 5, as Tucson, South Tucson, Pima County and Native leaders outvoted suburban town representatives.

Monday, the members of the board met behind closed doors and interviewed three applicants for the interim position. The names of those considered were not immediately released, but the board reconvened after more than 90 minutes in executive session to quickly nominate and vote to approve the choice of Ortega.

The motion to hire Ortega was made by Marana Mayor Jon
Post and seconded by Sahuarita Mayor Tom Murphy.

RTA Board Chair and Oro Valley Mayor Joe Winfield said the board was “greatly blessed” by having “three exceptional candidates” who “stepped forward to be considered.”

Ortega told the Sentinel he didn’t know how long he’d be the interim executive director.

“Obviously, getting a director on board soon is important, but I don’t have
a sense for how long that’s going to take,” Ortega said. “And I think
it’ll be up to the board to decide what it looks like in terms of the
timing. So it’s all pretty new.”

Leaders on the governing body of the regional road planning and construction body had been moving for weeks to terminate Moghimi, who has worked to balance the competing interests among the jurisdictions that make up the RTA since being appointed in 2013.

Tucson Mayor Regina
Romero, Pima County Supervisor Matt Heinz, South Tucson Mayor Roxanna
Valenzuela, Tohono O’odham Nation Chairman Verlon Jose and Pasqua Yaqui
Tribe Chairman Julian Hernandez were in favor of terminating Moghimi at the meeting at the beginning of the month.

Opposing the move were
Winfield, Post, Murphy and Arizona State Transportation Board
member Ted Maxwell, who heads up the Southern Arizona Leadership
Council.

The vote also ended Moghimi’s tenure at the Pima Association of Governments, the associated inter-governmental planning agency that works in conjunction with the RTA.

The upheaval at the RTA comes as the governing body of the regional road planning and construction body works to extend its life – and the accompanying half-cent-per-dollars sales tax that has funded transportation and transit projects across Pima County for the last two decades.

Passed by 58 percent of voters in 2006, the RTA sales tax will expire in the middle of 2026 if it is not renewed by voters.

The organization has been drafting a RTA Next plan that includes roughly $1.4 billion for roadway corridors, $610 million for transit, $206 million for various safety measures such as bike lanes, pedestrian improvements and traffic signal upgrades, $25 million for wildlife linkages, and $100 million for administrative costs, small business support and a debt service reserve. Another $65 million was set aside for contingencies, such as when projects cost more than the estimated price tag.

The deadline for the Pima County Board of Supervisors to call a March election is Sept. 11.

“We only have two months,” said Maxwell during the last meeting.

Ortega led City Hall for 8.5 years

Ortega took over as the city’s top bureaucrat in July 2015, and his
time at City Hall made him Tucson’s longest-serving appointed city
manager in decades, and the second-longest ever after former
manager Joel Valdez.

Ortega didn’t have any specific plans to take another job, he said in an interview with the Sentinel when he announced his decision to step down in January 2024, months beforehand.

Ortega
became city manager after a drawn-out search process, following a
revolving door of managers who ended up clashing with the mayor and City
Council — Jim Keene, Mike Hein, Mike Letcher and Richard Miranda
preceded him, with none lasting long in the hot seat.

Ortega said the city faced challenges when he was hired that were “complex” and “overwhelming, almost.”

He attributed his longevity to building a solid team and adopting an attitude of “know what you don’t know. Embrace it.”

At the beginning of last year, he reflected the sentiment of the Council when he sent a memo that strongly suggested the city walk away from the second round of the RTA if the funding formula wasn’t revised.

He wrote:

I may not be able to in good conscience recommend the city of Tucson
continue to participate in RTA Next. In essence, by participating in RTA
Next, the city would basically give up approximately $640 (million) of
revenue over the next 20 years or approximately $32 (million) annually.

***

In
the past, the city of Tucson has been challenged to demonstrate the
regional value of improvements and programs important to city residents
such as capital maintenance, modernization of corridors, and transit to
name a few. Based on these new numbers, I suspect it will be important
for the other regional partners to demonstrate and convince the city of
Tucson of how exactly their projects benefit the region, but more
specifically the city of Tucson residents.

I have been a proponent of a regional approach to solving the challenges
we all face including transportation and I still believe in a broad
regional approach as I continue to see value in it; however, when you
simply look at the numbers, it would be fiscally irresponsible for us to
leave $32 (million) on the table every year in the name of a regional
approach.

“What we’ve been talking about for years now is a plan that would
resonates with Tucson voters,” Ortega told Sentinel columnist Blake Morlock.  “The mayor and Council
are focusing on residents making sure investment is coming back to
them.”

In ensuing discussions, the various jurisdictions have shuffled around some planned projects and indicated that the city could receive a major share of revenues that might come in above their worst-case projections, prompting city leaders to moderate their stance and be more open to taking part in RTA Next.

In January, Romero said the RTA Next draft plan has met the City Council’s “minimum requests.”

“Can we do better?” she said. “Yes, but I think that the draft plan met the minimum requirements that my colleagues on the Council and I were most concerned about.”