Happy birthday, Tucson Agenda!

Three years ago, our baby sibling was born under stars and stripes on the Fourth of July.

Since 2023, the Tucson Agenda has been wheeling, dealing and bringing residents of Southern Arizona informative reporting on the issues that matter most in the area.

Sure, it hasn’t been around as long as the American union, but while everyone is thinking about the United States at 250, we wanted to take a moment to share a little cake for our sister publication.

As mentioned in Thursday’s edition of the Tucson Agenda, that’s all been thanks to our paid subscribers, who are functionally our only bosses since they provide nearly all of our revenue.

So to those subscribers, we offer a heartfelt thank you — and if you aren’t a paid subscriber, we humbly entreat you to consider becoming one.

It’s been a great ride so far — the Tucson Agenda team down in Tucson consistently cranks out some of the best journalism in Southern Arizona. Joe, one of the hardest-working reporters in Tucson (or the state), is basically writing a quality, informed story every weekday. And our editor Curt is always there, helping shape that reporting behind the scenes, rounding up the latest local stories for our “In Other News” section, or doing some original reporting of his own.

It’s because of their hard work that in just three years, the Tucson Agenda has become a staple of the Southern Arizona community.

The proof is in the proverbial pudding: the stories — unique, relevant and enlightening.

So in honor of our sister publication’s third birthday, we’re celebrating by looking back at a dozen of our all-time favorite clips — including profiles, historical studies, analyses on the money behind politics and media, and reporting on the Project Blue debate that overtook Tucson.

Here they are:

Comprehending the massive amounts of money spent by local governments is a tough task for any citizen — so Joe and Curt broke it down with a cheeky exercise, listing all the ways that Tucson and Pima County could spend $1 million of their $4 billion combined budgets. Some of the examples are 20,000 potholes, 23 miles of basic road repairs, 6 police officers, or 20 young firefighters.

It’s a prime example of the Agenda’s mission: engaging readers to make local government easier to understand.

This early Tucson Agenda dispatch (from its second week of life) tracks the wave of "independent expenditure" money that flooded Tucson's 2023 city council primaries, virtually none of it from Tucson itself. Real estate industry groups poured tens of thousands of dollars into backing a primary challenger against an incumbent, seemingly to fight future rent control, while an unregistered and opaque PAC linked to an election-denier attorney funded attack mailers against another candidate without filing the required paperwork.

It was the kind of accountability reporting the Agenda has built its reputation on by following campaign finance records to reveal who’s trying to influence Tucson.

Besides politics, the Agenda also keeps an eye on the media — something most outlets won’t touch. This recent story shed light on the alarming trend of billionaires buying up news outlets to be their playthings and, more specifically, David Hoffmann, the Missouri billionaire who bought the parent company of the Tucson Daily Star through a debt-restructuring deal.

Hoffmann has said he wants newspapers to be explicitly pro-business, raising concerns about editorial independence at the Daily Star and seemingly discouraging critical coverage of local issues, like data centers and Project Blue.

It’s fair to say that Project Blue’s proposed data center was one of the issues in Tucson since the Tucson Agenda was born.

This story served as a perfect mural about how a coalition of Tucson activists, journalists, and experts came together to push the city council to vote it down unanimously. It’s a story the Agenda played a role in, fact-checking the claims from the project developers on water and energy while documenting a relentless group of citizens who turned a little-known land deal into a defining local political fight.

Even after the city rejected Project Blue, this story documented how the fight continued at the county level, where the Pima County Board of Supervisors had already approved selling 290 acres of county land to the data center's developers. Hundreds of protesters turned out to pressure two swing-vote Democratic supervisors, Matt Heinz and Rex Scott, to reverse course.

Ultimately, they didn’t — but this stands as a great example of the continued reporting the Agenda did on the anti-Project Blue movement.

And of course, most recently, Joe covered a hilarious moment in the drama the only way that the Agenda knows how: treating it with ridiculous whimsy. We saw one of the strangest demonstrations of civil disobedience in recent memory when Vivek Bharathan with the No Desert Data Center Coalition sat barefoot atop the supervisors' dais and called for the resignation of the three supervisors who voted for the land sale to Project Blue’s developers.

No notes.

The Trump 2.0 administration has been quite the circus for media, with an overwhelming number of stories floating in the ether. The Tucson Agenda covered a few developments in the radical changes, like the administration pressuring the University of Arizona to adopt conservative policies, such as race- and gender-blind admissions, capped international enrollment and protections for right-wing viewpoints on campus.

The story tracked the dynamics of the conflict, with roughly $470 million in annual federal research money at risk in an early test of how much independence a financially fragile public university can retain under direct federal political pressure.

The team’s been keeping tabs on the southern border, too.

This July 2025 story documents how the Trump administration converted stretches of the Arizona-Mexico border into military installations, giving soldiers arrest authority and patrol powers well beyond the passive support roles the National Guard has had historically.

Ironically, it’s noted that this military buildup of thousands of troops, armored vehicles, and drones arrived just as unauthorized crossings in the Tucson Sector hit historic lows. The reporting put a light on a fundamental change in how the border is policed and by whom, raising legal questions about the Posse Comitatus Act and whether the administration was violating it by using combat-trained troops for civilian law enforcement.

Published the day after Congressman Raúl Grijalva's death from lung cancer complications, the story is partly a recap of his five decades of public service and progressive advocacy, partly political analysis about the dominoes that would fall in his district, and a chance for the Agenda staff to share their own memories of the Tucson legend.

Thoroughly researched and reported, this story was an essential explainer on Southern Arizona's political landscape and one of its most influential figures in classic Agenda form.

Equally textbook Agenda work came out of Sergio Arellano being named chair of the Arizona GOP earlier this year. The profile detailed Arellano’s history of making “election integrity” claims, his decision to suspend vote-counting for the state party’s bylaws (which were cast the same day he was elected chair) and his election itself, which took forever to hand-count ballots and caused the meeting to drag on for hours.

It’s the kind of in-depth political analysis that the Tucson Agenda’s team — with decades of experience covering the area — is equipped to deliver.

The team has also put out some great, well-researched stories about Arizona’s political history.

Ahead of the 2025 vote on "RTA Next," a proposed extension of Pima County’s transportation sales tax, Curt riffled through newspaper archives from 2004 to 2006 to show how officials sold the original $2 billion Regional Transportation Authority plan to skeptical voters two decades earlier, contextualizing the debate over RTA — which eventually passed.

This 2024 story was a fascinating dive into the history of Arizona's absentee and mail voting system, which has its origins in a 1990 dispute over former Senate President Pete Rios's own challenged absentee ballot. Eventually, the debacle led the Legislature to pass a law that let any Arizonan vote by mail for any reason. It documents the partisan press reaction at the time, with the Arizona Daily Star supportive and the Arizona Republic’s editorial board warning of "election-rigging.”

Okay, make it a baker’s dozen stories.

Not just any outlet would report on a sticker on a lobbyist’s laptop triggering Democratic Rep. Alma Hernandez into ranting during a committee hearing, on Twitter, and to us that its placement on the computer was “among the most inappropriate actions” she had ever witnessed “in a professional setting.”

But the Tucson Agenda did — and that, friends, is beautiful.