Guests - Mark Griffith, William Parven, Peter Gentala
Tucson's Moment of Choice: A Business Owner Steps Up, a Lawyer Seeks the Bench, and a Policy Leader Draws the Line
Ninety days from the primary. A Board of Supervisors meeting underway downtown with a billion-dollar spending maneuver on the agenda. A city burning through money it claims it doesn't have while considering shutting down fire stations. And a growing list of people who've seen enough and decided to do something about it.
That was the backdrop for a Tuesday on Winn Tucson — three guests, three very different battlegrounds, and one common thread: the question of who shows up to serve when institutions start to fail the people they're supposed to protect.
Mark Griffith: A Businessman Who's Had Enough
Mark Griffith has been fixing cars in Tucson for most of his life. He was born in Tucson, raised in Nogales, and made his way back to the city at age thirteen — old enough to watch it grow, old enough now to watch it decline. He runs Griffith Automotive. And as of last week, he is running for mayor of the city of Tucson.
"We're going in the wrong direction," Griffith said plainly. "There's no help for a small business. There's no help for growth. Our roads are not being repaired. You can see funds being taken from TPD, from our fire department. It's time for a change."
The announcement came after years of watching the city's priorities drift further from the needs of the people who actually live and work here. Griffith is not a politician. He is a man who knows what it takes to make payroll, to keep the lights on, to earn the trust of customers and employees — and who has grown tired of watching city leadership operate with none of those constraints.
He came to the studio that morning with a story that was equal parts funny and infuriating. He had driven in already carrying a spare shirt — a habit he's developed because the roads in Tucson are bad enough that hitting a pothole and spilling coffee on yourself is a genuine occupational hazard. When he opened his shop, a customer arrived unexpectedly for exactly that reason. The man had been rerouted by overnight construction changes, hit a pothole on the detour, and soaked himself before a morning meeting. He had no backup shirt. Griffith gave him his white one.
"He had no plan to come to my business that morning," Griffith said. "He was focused on a meeting. And he walked in needing a shirt because the city can't maintain its roads."
The city's fiscal picture is what Griffith describes as a management crisis, not a revenue problem. Tucson doubled its budget, voted pay raises for city leadership, and still finds itself unable to fund basic services. The city is now actively considering shutting down two fire stations — a proposal Griffith called "horrible" without hesitation.
"We are the second largest county in the state of Arizona," he said. "We are the most taxed county in the state of Arizona. And Tucson's crime rate, based on our population, is abhorrent. Last I looked we were number three in the country."
He paused. "We're not Chicago. We're not New York. We're not L.A. And it's embarrassing. But it's also correctable."
The free bus system became a focal point of the conversation. Griffith doesn't oppose public transportation on principle — he sees a time and a place for it. But he is unambiguous that running it for free right now, while the city lacks the resources to fund law enforcement and fire services adequately, is a misalignment of priorities that compounds itself.
"Free is still a cost," he said. "We have to pay the employees. We have to get the gas. The money's not going to come out of a tree. By offering a free service, we're taking the money from something else to pay for it." Local police officers, he noted, refer to the free transit system as "the crime bus" — a mobile homeless shelter that pulls police resources away from other needs every single day.
Griffith's approach to fixing Tucson's finances mirrors how he runs his shop: you look at the books, you find the leaks, and you stop the bleeding. He doesn't want to walk in with a predetermined agenda — he wants to see the actual numbers first. But he has a working hypothesis about where the money has been going.
"Would I be surprised to find that money's been funneled to NGOs that deal with different political projects?" he was asked.
"I wouldn't be surprised," he said simply. "We hope they didn't do that. But where is it going? The proof is in the pudding."
Downtown Tucson is a place Griffith says he stopped taking his family years ago. Knife fights. Machete attacks. Drug activity. Homelessness that has metastasized from a human problem the city can manage into a political program the city funds at the expense of everyone else. He described feeling as though he runs not one family but three — his own, his employees, and his customers.
"I have to take care of my patrons. I have to take care of my staff. When we have the drug addiction that we have in this town, and the amount of homeless, and it's going in a real bad direction, I'm having to cover everything to make sure everybody's safe."
His campaign slogan is direct: Change is coming for 2027.
The mayoral election is not on this year's ballot — it is a 2027 race, giving Tucsonans time to vet a candidate who is deliberately starting early. Griffith wants people to get to know him before they vote, not because he's trying to build a brand but because he believes the job of fixing this city requires trust, and trust takes time.
His campaign kickoff event takes place Sunday at St. Phillips Plaza, 6 to 7:30 p.m. at The Union. Campaign website: MarkGriffithForMayor.com — with the number four.
The Spending Limit Fight: What the Supervisors Don't Want You to Know Before November
While Griffith was in studio, the Pima County Board of Supervisors was convening for a meeting that had been publicly posted but barely publicized — a meeting at which the Democratic majority was expected to vote to refer a massive spending limit expansion to the November ballot.
The mechanics of it were explained on the previous day's show by Brenda Marts and Jay Tolkoff, and Winn returned to the issue with additional context provided by a former Pima County supervisor who reached out after Monday's segment.
Here is the core of what's happening: In 1980, Arizona voters passed a constitutional amendment — with roughly 80 percent approval — placing spending limits on counties based on a baseline formula. Pima County's base was set at $93.7 million. That base hasn't been adjusted in 45 years because the formula already builds in annual adjustments for population growth and inflation. The current expenditure cap — after 45 years of those automatic increases — sits at approximately $762 million.
What the Board of Supervisors wants to do is add $70 million to the original $93.7 million base. That injection doesn't stay at $70 million. Everything else in the formula is calculated from that base. The result is a new spending cap of approximately $1.333 billion — nearly double the current limit, in a single vote.
The deeper problem surfaced in the communication Winn received from a former supervisor: Pima County is already collecting more in taxes than the current spending cap allows them to spend. The formula calculates the cap using population figures — and Tucson's population has been declining. They are overcharging taxpayers, sitting on a surplus they're legally prohibited from spending under the current cap, and rather than return that money or cut taxes, they are moving to expand the cap so they can spend it.
"The calculation is based on population growth or loss," Winn said. "Tucson is in a declining population trend. The people that have been elected have to take responsibility for their policies. They're the policymakers. They kept that limitation in place for 45 years by managing within it. Now they want to expand it — and they're going to ask the voters to approve it."
Only seven of Arizona's fifteen counties have ever requested an expenditure limit increase in the four and a half decades since the law passed. One county — Greenlee — asked three times. Pima County is asking for the first time, and they have timed the ballot referral for a midterm election year when voter turnout will be lower than a presidential cycle.
The expenditure limitation was put in place precisely to prevent this scenario: a government that mismanages its finances, collects more than it should, and then asks the public to ratify the excess rather than correct the problem.
"The system that was put in place in 1980 approved by the voters isn't broken," Winn said. "The people running it are wanting to get more of your money. The more they do that, the people that have resources will leave. They'll sell their businesses, they'll move away. And the problem will escalate."
The vote on whether to oppose this measure on the November ballot will require an organized effort to explain the math to Pima County voters before the left's messaging machine defines the terms.
William Parven: The Lawyer Running for Justice of the Peace You've Never Heard of (But Should)
There are nine Justice of the Peace positions in Pima County. Most people couldn't name the one serving their precinct. And yet these courts — limited jurisdiction courts handling traffic tickets, landlord-tenant disputes, small claims, misdemeanors, and preliminary felony hearings — are the most common point of contact between the average Tucsonan and the legal system.
William Parven has been practicing law in these courts almost every day for years. He holds a contract with Pima County for public defender work in limited jurisdiction matters. He has been approved for pro tempore judge status — essentially a substitute judge who steps in when needed. He knows the law, knows the judges, knows the prosecutors, and knows the system from every angle.
He is running for Justice of the Peace in Precinct 8 — and the story of how that precinct came to exist is itself a window into how Pima County's Democratic-controlled Board of Supervisors operates.
"I moved here and bought a house in JP5," Parven said. "I had this plan all along — I thought I'd be great at this because I'd studied it so long and practiced in this court. And then the Board of Supervisors determined we don't need ten judges. We only need nine. And of course, you can guess which one they decided to remove."
The Republican precinct.
They redrew the boundaries, combined precincts, and created the new Precinct 8 — a district Winn described, looking at the map, as something drawn by "a drunken cow." The irregular, zigzagging boundary encompasses mostly east Tucson. The justification offered by the board was that the new precinct would be competitive, not partisan. Parven is taking them at their word.
"I want to prove the Board of Supervisors right," he said. "They said it would be competitive. I'm going to make it competitive."
Parven's legal background is a direct argument for why this race matters. Arizona does not require justices of the peace to be attorneys — a fact that surprised Parven when he first arrived in the state.
"When I first came to Arizona, I assumed all the judges were attorneys," he said. "It's the problem. This is interesting because it's hard to practice law when the judge is not law trained. You have to really train yourself. You're like teaching law to the judges almost."
His 15-plus years of practice have been focused almost exclusively on the kinds of cases Justice Courts handle: traffic offenses, DUIs, misdemeanors, landlord-tenant disputes. He graduated from law school during the Great Recession, when no law firm was hiring, and built his practice from scratch by doing what other attorneys didn't want to do — the small, unglamorous, technically demanding work that courts most people never think about until they suddenly need them.
"Traffic tickets, something easy to learn, and you could do it and make your own work," he said. "And that worked out great. So I really started studying the things that are in limited jurisdiction courts."
His critique of the current court in Pima County is precise. Justice Courts in most Arizona counties operate as general jurisdiction — the judge serves the whole precinct, including all case types. Pima County has, for years, allowed judges to specialize, cherry-picking the areas of law they prefer and offloading the rest to hearing officers or other judges.
"My opponent really likes to do domestic violence court and she set up a system," Parven said. "In some ways that's good. But she's not really doing the other areas of law all the time that I think a justice of the peace should do. You should do everything — things you like and don't like."
Superior Court has, he noted, recently issued orders directing Pima County Justice Court judges to represent their precincts fully. Parven intends not just to comply but to insist on it.
"If I hear about a case going to somebody else, I want to say, 'No — that's my jurisdiction. I'm the judge.' I'm not going to say that's beneath me. I don't care if it's a small little issue. That person deserves to be heard by the judge of their precinct."
He extended this principle to small claims court — an area that, in most Arizona counties, falls under Justice Court jurisdiction but that Pima County has handled differently for years.
"I've had the opportunity as a pro tem to see landlord-tenant disputes," he said. "It's a very difficult area. I can understand why judges don't want to do it. But it has to be done. You need to follow the law and be fair. I found it's great experience to do uncomfortable areas of law."
On the question of whether the court has become politicized — and whether a Republican candidate for a judicial position is at odds with the principle of impartial justice — Parven offered a thoughtful answer.
"The best judges, you should not know their political party. They're just good judges," he said. "I can tell you that there are Democrat judges who are really good judges. Republican judges are excellent judges. If you don't know their political affiliation, that's a sign of a good judge. That's what I'm going to be."
He gathered the signatures to get on the ballot himself, going door to door, because he wanted to meet the community — not as an introduction but as a statement.
"I didn't get volunteers. I'm doing the work myself. You should meet your candidate."
Precinct 8 has approximately 80,000 residents. There are roughly 7,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans, with independents as the second-largest group. Parven's plan for reaching them is the same as his plan for gathering signatures: show up in person, explain his background, and let his record in the courts speak.
William Parven is on the November ballot for Justice of the Peace, Justice Precinct 8, Pima County.
Peter Gentala: Center for Arizona Policy, and the Long Fight for Families, Faith, and the Law
Peter Gentala came to the Center for Arizona Policy through a path that, in retrospect, makes complete sense — even if he didn't see the destination while he was walking toward it.
He had worked at Alliance Defending Freedom, representing people targeted for their faith. He had served as senior legal counsel for the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, taking civil cases on behalf of trafficking survivors and working with state and federal lawmakers to close the loopholes exploiters depend on. He had been at the Center for Arizona Policy before, serving as legal counsel under then-president Len Munsell from 2003 to 2008. When Kathy Herod — who led the organization for years and became one of the defining voices of Arizona's pro-family policy movement — stepped down, Gentala realized, after a period of what he described as prayer and discernment, that he had been quietly recruiting himself.
"I was totally focused on litigating on behalf of survivors," he said. "We've got to recruit someone to come in and be the next leader at CAP. It took a journey and a journey of prayer for my family and I to realize — the Center for Arizona Policy has an impact that could force multiply. We could affect the lives of many survivors and the kinds of coalitions that can come together in support of human dignity."
He has now been president of CAP for just over a year. The organization's mission — to promote and defend the foundational values of life, marriage, family, and religious freedom — has rarely been more contested than it is right now. And rarely more consequential.
Sex Trafficking: Progress at the Legislature
Gentala opened on the issue of sex trafficking because it is, in his words, unconscionable that in the year of America's 250th anniversary, young women in Tucson and Phoenix are living under someone else's control in broad daylight.
"It's hard to find someone in public life who would say they're not concerned about sex trafficking," he said. "So that's really great."
And the momentum is producing legislation. A bill is moving through the Arizona legislature — with a companion bill in the Senate — that would, for the first time in Arizona, separate the legal definitions between buyers of sex and sellers of sex. The practical effect: Arizona could ramp up penalties for sex buyers while simultaneously expanding services for women who have been trafficked.
"That has even been bipartisan for many of the votes," Gentala said. The predators, as Winn noted, don't care how their victims vote. And the politics around stopping them reflect that.
The Supreme Court and Parental Rights in Education
The larger portion of Gentala's appearance focused on two recent Supreme Court decisions that represent a significant reassertion of parental authority over children's education — and what they mean for Arizona families.
The first, the Mahmoud decision, was decided last term. At its center was a coalition of Muslim and Christian parents in Maryland who objected to a school district's aggressive sexualized curriculum and sought a meaningful right to opt their children out. When the school board refused, the case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the parents.
"It's a very significant decision," Gentala said. "It affirmed the constitutional right of parents to control the education and upbringing of their children."
The second case, still working through the courts, arose from California's practice of social gender transitioning in public schools without parental knowledge or consent. School administrators were transitioning children — changing their names, pronouns, and social identities — while actively concealing this from parents and guardians.
"The Supreme Court stepped in and said the parents were likely to win," Gentala said. "It sent it back to the California court system, but this time sharing that the parents are likely to win on the merits."
In Arizona, the Walden case out of Mesa is tracking similar ground. Mesa Public Schools — the largest school district in Arizona — maintained a practice, not formally adopted by the board but known throughout the district, of keeping parents uninformed when their children adopted opposite-sex identities at school. The Arizona Court of Appeals ruled that litigation against the district should move forward, and importantly, held that the statute of limitations runs as long as the practice continues — meaning parents who discovered the concealment later can still seek accountability.
"If children are transitioned, it is a lifelong situation," Winn noted. "You need to continue to stay in that state, continue to take drugs. And many children commit suicide." The legal and medical consequences of transitioning decisions made without parental knowledge or consent are not hypothetical. They are unfolding in families across the state.
The ESA Fight: Education Savings Accounts Under Threat
Gentala connected parental rights in the courtroom to parental rights in the marketplace — specifically the fight over Arizona's Education Savings Account program, which allows parents to use public education funding to choose the school that is right for their child.
Arizona's ESA program is among the most expansive in the country. Gentala describes it as a genuine source of hope for families moving to the state with school-age children.
"I tell them: congratulations," he said. "You're coming to a state that has so many different options. Every child is unique, gifted by God in unique ways. It's hard to say there's a perfect educational plan that fits every child. The panoply of options we have in Arizona is a wonderful thing."
The threat is immediate. Teacher unions and their political allies are currently gathering signatures with the explicit goal of gutting the ESA program — not reforming it, but eliminating it as a functional option for Arizona families.
"They want to shut down the market," Gentala said. "They want it to not exist anymore."
Winn was direct about the motivation. "They've lost control in public schools because the money follows the student. It's all about the money grab. I wish it was about a different education plan for students, but it isn't."
Charlie Kirk's Legacy and the Shift Among Young Men
The conversation turned to something more personal: the momentum Gentala detects among young men — a turn toward faith, toward family, toward the kind of rooted commitment that has been culturally marginalized for the better part of a generation.
He credited the late Charlie Kirk's influence, particularly the evolution Kirk was undergoing in the final chapter of his life and ministry — toward personal faithfulness, family, and the Sabbath. Kirk's posthumously released book, focused on rest and the practice of keeping the Sabbath, reflects a man who was digging his roots deep into the ground beneath the activism.
"I processed his tragic death as their loss," Gentala said of his own college-aged children. "It was kind of like an older brother had been taken from them. And on the other hand, I was just so stunned by the miraculous degree of influence he had and by how I could see him grow. He was growing in this particular direction — lifelong faithfulness with family and personal faithfulness toward God."
At Arizona State University, Gentala witnessed a Christian apologist speaking outside the Hayden Library — within minutes, several hundred students had gathered to listen. The openness was real, and it surprised him.
"I do think the Lord is doing something," he said.
Leadership matters. That's Gentala's summation. People who step forward, speak the truth, challenge dangerous assumptions, and then trust the outcome to God — and move to the next battle.
"And Kathy Herod is so strong about that," he said. "That's where we're going. We'll do a cap. And then move to the next battle."
On abortion, Gentala was clear-eyed and not willing to accept a permanent defeat. Arizona's constitutional amendment enshrining a right to abortion was, in his words, deeply disappointing. But he sees it as unsustainable.
"You can't have a constitutional right to destroy someone else," he said. "I'm confident that's going to ultimately be repealed. It is at odds with our very structure as a free people."
California's recent law expanding abortion access to twenty-seven days after birth — which Winn and Gentala characterized as codified infanticide — is not a distant horror. History has proven that what California does does not stay in California.
The Center for Arizona Policy is a nonprofit advocacy organization. It does not endorse candidates, but it works tirelessly in the legislature, the courts, and the broader public square to defend the foundational values of life, marriage, family, and religious freedom. They can be supported at azpolicy.org.
Peter Gentala's quote, shared by Winn at the close of their conversation, reflects the man:
"For me, the best part of being a lawyer is learning more about the heart of the best lawyer. Jesus Christ. I'm glad He is my advocate. He's the only one who would — who could ever — successfully plead my case."
Winn Tucson airs Monday through Friday, 9 to 11 a.m., on KVOI 1030 The Voice.
Mark Griffith's campaign kickoff: Sunday at St. Phillips Plaza, The Union, 6–7:30 p.m. | MarkGriffithForMayor.com
William Parven is on the November ballot for Justice of the Peace, Justice Precinct 8, Pima County.
Center for Arizona Policy: azpolicy.org