Tucson & Pima officials unclear on impact of Trump’s orders halting road & bridge funding

Local officials are still unclear on the impact of some of the executive orders issued by President Donald Trump in the first few days of his administration, including a stoppage in funding for transportation projects passed by Congress.

City of Tucson and Pima County officials are mostly taking a wait-and-see approach to executive orders such as “Unleashing American Energy,” which requires federal agencies to “immediately pause the disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 or the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act” to ensure that any grants, loans, contracts or other financial disbursements do not conflict with the policies set out within the executive order, which limits renewable energy projects and expands the consumption of fossil fuels.

For example, the order explicitly blocks federal funding for electric vehicle charging stations.

City Attorney Mike Rankin told Tucson City Council members this week that given the number of the Trump administration’s executive orders, it’s going to take time to sort them to determine their impact, especially given that some of them, such as the order ending birthright citizenship, were likely to face legal challenges. (The order ending birthright citizenship has already been blocked by a federal judge, who called it “blatantly unconstitutional.”)

“It’s going to take us – and by us, I mean the manager, the executive leadership team of the city, the subject matter experts throughout the city – some time to evaluate what impact, if any, of these various orders and proclamations are going to have on us or our surrounding community,” Rankin said at Wednesday’s City Council meeting.

Some of the many projects — which were passed by the last Congress and approved by President Joe Biden — that could be affected by Trump’s halt to federal funds include:

• $86 million for the recently announced Advanced Water Purification Demonstration Facility, which would process “toilet-to-tap” water for Tucson
• $55 million for Tucson International Airport
• $99 million for construction at the San Luis border crossing
• $2.15 billion for forest health and wildfire reduction work in Arizona
• $440,000 for a street safety study in Douglas, Ariz.
• $2.8 million for the “Safe Routes to School” program in Pima County
• $4 million for clean school buses at TUSD
• Ongoing funding for PFAS cleanup in Tucson

Tucson Mayor Regina Romero, who had been effective at winning grants from the Biden administration, said she believed that any signed contract would ensure the city received promised dollars.

“I know that we signed on the dotted line, on a lot of them, and a contract is a contract by law,” Romero said. “So the federal funds that we signed the contract for should be, according to our laws, a legal document.”

Pima County officials likewise said they were still sorting through the legal details.

“I think we’re still looking into the specific implications for the county, but where we have been consistent since the first pandemic relief bills under the first Trump administration is not using any federal pandemic relief funds for anything that’s going to require local funds once those funds run out,” Scott said.

The one exception, Scott noted, was the county’s preschool scholarship program, PEEPS, which will be funded in the future through the county’s library property tax, which can be used on early childhood education programs.

But the county did take a major step today, announcing that it would be shutting down its shelters for legally processed asylum seekers.

Asylum seekers who had been arrested and released with a future court date to adjudicate their asylum claims had been able to stay in the shelters for a few days while making travel arrangements to their final destination, where they would live with family members or other sponsors.

The county had been reimbursed based on the number of asylum seekers they had aided, but this week, none were released by the Border Patrol.

“This puts the county in a very precarious financial position,” Lesher told the supervisors in a Thursday memo. “Whether there are people under shelter or not, the county still incurs operational costs from its contractors for staffing readiness, shelter amenity rentals (such as the portable showers), heating and cooling costs, and more. With no individuals in the facility for which the county could be reimbursed, the county general fund would have to cover those operational costs.”