An Air Force veteran and nonprofit represented by the Goldwater Institute are suing Pima County over its “illegal” firearms mandate.
Pima County wants to fine residents $1,000 if they fail to report a lost or stolen firearm to the government within two days.
State law prohibits local governments from regulating firearms. A Goldwater press release says the county Board of Supervisors appeared to be aware of the law when they passed the ordinance.
Goldwater is suing on behalf of veteran Chris King and Pima County-based Arizona Citizens Defense League to stop the mandate.
“The new reporting ordinance isn’t just illegal—it takes aim at the wrong people,” Goldwater staff attorney Parker Jackson said. “Rather than target criminals who steal firearms, the new requirement revictimizes law-abiding gun owners who experience the loss or theft of a firearm. Some may not even realize they are victims until much later.”
King, a county resident and NRA-certified firearms instructor, said he values his right to bear arms in Arizona.
“When my apartment was burglarized, both my wife and I were on active-duty out of state, and I didn’t even discover my firearm had been stolen until a week later,” King said. “We’re a nation of laws, and Arizona law clearly prohibits local governments from imposing regulations contradictory to the laws of this state. Why do Pima County officials think they’re above the law?”
The city of Tucson made a similar attempt to limit the right to bear arms, and the Arizona Attorney General found it illegal.
Public records obtained by Goldwater show that the Pima Board of Supervisors, led by District 1 Supervisor Rex Scott and Board Chair Adelita Grijalva, has been preparing for this fight for more than two years by coordinating with left-wing activist groups, attorneys, and other elected officials, according to the news release.
“These are fundamental constitutional rights, and the state legislature has repeatedly reinforced and protected those rights from local interference through laws prohibiting local governments from implementing almost any form of firearm regulations,” Jackson said.
Elizabeth Troutman is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send her news tips using this link.
State Rep. Quang Nguyen (R-LD01) advised Pima County that its latest firearms ordinance violates state law.
In a Tuesday letter to the county’s board of supervisors, Nguyen said the ordinance, which imposes reporting requirements and fines on gun owners related to loss or theft of a firearm, was “extremely troubling” since it amounted to regulatory authority only available to the state legislature per state law, supported by a 2017 Arizona Supreme Court ruling. Nguyen pointed out that a similar ordinance by the city of Tucson was determined unlawful by then-Attorney General Tom Horne in 2013.
“Another attempt to regulate firearms via an illegal ordinance by Pima County,” said Nguyen.
Nguyen also pointed out that the city of Phoenix’s ordinance regulating unclaimed firearms violated multiple state laws, per Attorney General Kris Mayes last September. Mayes affirmed the Arizona Supreme Court’s determination that firearms regulation remains a statewide concern.
Under Pima County’s new ordinance passed last week, gun owners face up to $1,000 in fines every time they fail to report lost or stolen firearms to police within two days. The board of supervisors passed the ordinance 4-1; only Supervisor Steve Christy voted against it.
In the ordinance, the board of supervisors justified its regulation by relaying that those prohibited from owning firearms have committed a significant number of the county’s firearm-related crimes with the help of straw purchasers. The board reasoned that the ordinance’s reporting requirements would help find and prosecute those straw purchasers.
“Reporting requirements assist with the apprehension and prosecution of straw purchasers, preventing or deterring them from claiming that a firearm they bought and transferred to a prohibited possessor was lost or taken in an unreported theft as well as preventing or deterring prohibited possessors from falsely claiming that their firearms were lost or stolen when law enforcement moves to remove them,” read the ordinance.
The ordinance originally proposed a $300 fine for each failure to report a lost or stolen firearm.
It was Pima County Attorney Laura Conover who suggested an increase in the fine amount to $1,000, in her letter of support to the board. Conover said that her office had handled over 100 cases involving firearms used by prohibited possessors last year, six of which were murder charges. Conover’s letter made no mention of the potential conflict between the ordinance and state law.
“Do we want law enforcement in Pima County to track down the origins of a firearm only after a crime has been committed, only to be told that the firearm was lost or stolen?” said Conover. “Or do we want to provide law enforcement with an opportunity to track down lost or stolen firearms before they land into the hands of prohibited possessors or, worse, the hands of young people or people with mental disabilities?”
The county further justified its ordinance by citing a 1998 Arizona Court of Appeals ruling in City of Tucson v. Rineer and a federal district court ruling on a California law in National Association for Gun Rights v. City of San Jose. Nguyen criticized the county’s justifications as irrelevant to their ordinance.
“Rineer analyzed the validity of a Tucson City Code provision that prohibited using or possessing firearms within Tucson city parks. Rineer also predates the Arizona Supreme Court’s 2017 opinion in City of Tucson,” said Nguyen. “It should go without saying that Arizonans expect county officials to enact laws that comply with Arizona laws, not California laws. Moreover, the ordinance that the federal court considered in the San Jose case did not impose any mandatory reporting requirements, fines, or penalties and bears no resemblance to the Ordinance here.”
Nguyen warned the county that “knowing and willful” violations of state firearm law incur a $50,000 penalty.
Pima County’s firearms ordinance takes effect in April.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
Pima County officials are warning that the community will suffer from a homeless crisis of illegal immigrants come Easter Sunday after federal funding for illegal immigrant support runs out.
County officials estimate that there will be as many as 400 to 1,000 illegal immigrants released by border agents into Tucson daily.
The county has spent about $1 million a week to shelter around 1,000 illegal immigrants — bussed in by state-contracted coach transportation — using funds sourced from the federal Shelter and Services Program. If the county were to take on all the sheltering and service costs, taxpayers would be putting up between $50 and $60 million a year.
About a billion in federal funding for SSP was tied into the failed foreign aid bill engineered by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ). SSP was specifically allocated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to mitigate illegal immigrant shelter and service costs borne by non-federal entities.
The Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) allocated $363.8 million to SSP for the 2023 fiscal year. Pima County received over $12 million from SSP. These funds went to Catholic Community Services’ (CCS) Casa Alitas shelters, which served as a middle man of sorts amid the Border Patrol’s catch and release of illegal immigrants. Without federal funds, illegal immigrants will likely end up living on the streets.
The World Hunger Ecumenical Task Force (WHETF) in Maricopa County received nearly $8.5 million. WHETF of Cochise County received $150,000, and Yuma County WHETF received over $11 million.
Last month, Pima County Administrator Jan Lesher warned the Board of Supervisors (BOS) in a memo that the county no longer had sufficient funding to continue shelter and other services for illegal immigrants.
Lesher advised the board that she had instructed a full stop to county coordination, contracts management, and funding reimbursement of the shelter services on Easter Sunday. Currently, the county’s Grants Management and Innovation Office, Office of Emergency Management, and Procurement are winding down those processes.
The county administrator explained that illegal immigrants would flock to Tucson from across Pima, Cochise, and Santa Cruz counties because the city offers more transportation opportunities and homelessness support than the rural counties.
“There is already a difficult homeless problem in Pima County that we are working tirelessly to solve or mitigate,” said Lesher. “What we are about to experience with street releases is homelessness on steroids.”
The county is considering two plans for handling the anticipated influx of roving illegal immigrants. However, Lesher advised against any of the plans as “imprudent,” arguing that the border crisis was a federal problem that should be covered by federal funding.
“This is a crisis of the federal government’s making due to the failure to pass sensible border and immigration reform and to provide the necessary funding to local jurisdictions forced to deal with the deleterious effects of federal border policy,” said Lesher.
The first plan would involve a county-owned building, the Mission Facility west of the Pima County Adult Detention Complex. One version of the plan would cost over $126,000 a month and another $40,000 for necessary materials. The illegal immigrants would be bussed and released to the location, and upon arrival given only the “bare necessities:” utilities, maintenance, janitorial services, 24-hour security, and communication aids such as an A-frame sign and language-specific cards and fliers. Under this plan, the county would not provide food or transportation. A second version of the plan would increase costs to over $396,900 a month to provide support staffing and food, but not transportation.
The second plan would make use of the county-owned Pima Fairgrounds “Raceway” and install the rental of a large tent and portable showers. That would cost $305,100 to erect and about $283,200 to maintain monthly, minimum. Additional costs have yet to be discerned.
Of the five viable non-county buildings and properties, the owners either expressed no interest in housing illegal immigrants or the properties were unsuitable for mass sheltering operations.
Among the services discontinued, per a memo issued to the BOS earlier this month, will be both the short and long-distance transportation services for asylum seekers (ending August 15 and April 11, respectively), staffing support services for humanitarian assistance program (ending May 11), and food service county congregate and non-congregate shelters (ending May 31). Another program, hotel shelter services for COVID-positive asylum seekers, will conclude next week.
Although those dates extend beyond Lesher’s directive to stop county efforts as of Easter Sunday, the county administrator noted in her February memo to BOS that she was planning for the possibility of reimbursement requests coming in after the programs conclude.
Per the county administrator’s last weekly situational report, issued in mid-February, there was a daily average of 910 arrivals and weekly average of over 6,300 arrivals. Since Jan. 1, 2019, the county has recorded over 405,000 releases in the area.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
Clean and accurate voter rolls are a cornerstone to safe and secure elections. And they are required by both state and federal law. Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) specifically obligates states to conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters due to death or change of residence. The U.S. Supreme Court even backed this up in its 2018 decision in the case Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute.
But Arizona’s current Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and its former Secretary of State (now Governor) Katie Hobbs have failed to perform the necessary voter list maintenance. And right now, 14 Arizona counties are in violation of Section 8 of the NVRA…
The Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS) will give $25 gift cards to attendees of an LGBTQ+ “health equity” event on Tuesday.
Attendance was limited to 30 people, or $750 in gift cards. Attendees were required to be at least 18 years old, living in Pima County, and identifying as an LGBTQ+ community member.
ADHS partnered with the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation (SAAF) to host the event. SAAF confirmed with AZ Free News that there would be about 12 participants. Also helping facilitate the event was Lenartz Consulting — a company owned by Tracy Lenartz, a health planning consultant for ADHS. Recordings from these in-person listening sessions are anonymized and transferred to ADHS for review before being destroyed.
According to ADHS, referencing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “health equity” is defined as the fair and just opportunity for all to achieve the highest level of health. Equity is also at the center of the CDC’s 10 Essential Public Health Services framework, unchanged for 25 years until September 2020 — less than four months after the death of George Floyd, which spurred months of Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots and social justice campaigns across state and local governments.
“To achieve equity, the Essential Public Health Services actively promote policies, systems, and overall community conditions that enable optimal health for all and seek to remove systemic and structural barriers that have resulted in health inequities,” stated the CDC. “Such barriers include poverty, racism, gender discrimination, ableism, and other forms of oppression. Everyone should have a fair and just opportunity to achieve optimal health and well-being.”
ADHS adopted an “equity focus” as one of its core values, and added “advancing health equity” to their strategic map issued last year.
The map noted that “equity focused” meant that ADHS valued and respected diverse life differences. In order to understand its equity focus, ADHS suggested resources for the community such as training modules on social determinants of health and how health inequity is rooted in “powerlessness.”
In honor of #NationalMinorityHealthMonth, ADHS is proud to highlight our Office of Health Equity and their work to reduce health disparities in Arizona by supporting communities of color. Thank you for all that you do! pic.twitter.com/8Luh8CDtvE
The ADHS definition of social determinants of health suggests that personal behaviors and clinical care are only a minor part of what determines one’s health. The other, greater factors would be social, economic, and environmental conditions: policies, programs, systems, communities such as transportation options, segregation, housing, discrimination, crime, and poor quality of education.
The concept of powerlessness referenced by ADHS comes from institutions like the World Health Organization (WHO), which theorizes that a lack of social and institutional power inequities results in poorer health in the poor, minorities, and women. The WHO suggested that political interventions must be implemented in order to reverse negative health trends: legal reform, or changes in economic or social relationships.
ADHS also participates in an annual Arizona Health Equity Conference which tackles these issues. This year, they will be joined by Arizona State University (ASU) Southwest Interdisciplinary Research Center, Arizona Alliance For Community Health Centers, A.T. Still University, Dignity Health, Esperanca, Equality Health, FSL, Honor Health, Mayo Clinic, Mercy Care, and the University of Arizona (UArizona) Mel & Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health.
