Guests - Jeff Rhodes, Gary Snyder, Dave Smith, Jack Dona
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Jeff Rhodes: Why Pima County's Crime Problem Has a Zip Code
Pima County voters get a rare mid-cycle chance this fall to reshape the Board of Supervisors, and Jeff Rhodes, a Republican candidate for the open District 5 seat, argues the district's problems have become impossible to ignore. The seat opened when Andrés Cano was appointed — not elected — to replace Adelita Grijalva after she stepped down to run for Congress, and Rhodes says the district needs a representative chosen by voters, not installed by the outgoing machine.
Rhodes rejects the idea that Pima County is unreachable for Republicans. "There are a lot of people who are neither blue or red that have just given up," he said, arguing the county's persistent one-party rule is less about ideology than disengagement — a problem he's working to reverse door by door, mostly on weekends. What he hears most from voters, he said, is resignation: "I'm not voting anymore, we can't make any changes, it's too entrenched." Rhodes doesn't buy it. "Tucson is a great place," he said, "and we can make it safe, we can make it better for businesses and better for the people."
The case Rhodes makes centers on a startling concentration of violent crime within District 5 over just the past two months: a Tucson Police Department recruit shot and killed, with his wife injured in the same incident; a carjacking at Ajo and Kinney the same night; a stabbing death at Speedway and Euclid the same morning; a mass shooting downtown that wounded nine people; an assault on a woman in an apartment parking lot; and the beating death of a woman in the Sam Hughes neighborhood, whose attacker has since been incarcerated. "That's a pretty high concentration in a short time," Rhodes said, adding that District 5's own supervisor has made no public comment on any of it. "Why draw attention to a failure?"
Rhodes was particularly pointed about the downtown mass shooting, where two Tucson police officers stopped the gunman and prevented what could have been nine fatalities — officers Rhodes noted were off-duty, working private security, not on-duty TPD units as Mayor Regina Romero implied in public remarks crediting the department the next day. Rhodes contrasted that with Supervisor Cano's response to a separate public-safety controversy in Eagle Point, where residents complained about unauthorized off-road vehicles and gunfire near a neighborhood on state trust land. After media coverage forced a response, extra patrols went out, some arrests were made, and patrols scaled back once attention faded — at which point the activity resumed. Cano later delivered pizzas to sheriff's deputies at a substation, with a news crew in tow. "It was a publicity stunt," Rhodes said. "It's political theater."
On taxes, Rhodes brought his own property tax statement to illustrate the county's direction: his bill rose 10.8% this year, driven by a $0.03 per $100 of assessed value rate increase layered on top of market-value reassessment. He cited other examples from constituents — an 11.6% increase, a 30% increase, and a $800 annual jump on a commercial property downtown — and said county officials have signaled plans for two more 3-cent rate increases over the next two years, on top of what Proposition 425 would separately allow once the county nears its maximum levy threshold. Rhodes connected the tax trajectory directly to a recently announced $8.7 million county commitment to affordable housing. "This is what socialism looks like," he said. "They're making it so unaffordable... instead of taking care of the crime issues, the homeless problem, the bad business policies, they are running a socialist woke agenda."
Rhodes also raised Tucson Water's 19.2% rate increase for county residents outside city limits, who have no vote on the city council setting those rates — a increase he traced to Cano casting the deciding vote against a county lawsuit that had previously succeeded in blocking a similar rate hike. Cano had worked for the city immediately before his appointment to the board. "It seems a little shady to me," Rhodes said.
Rhodes described Pima County's Democratic leadership as a multi-generational political network — the Grijalva and Romero families, along with Richard Elías and Cano, who started as a teenage intern in the District 5 office under Elías. "He's been groomed for this position," Rhodes said. "He's part of that machine." Rhodes said his own campaign is deliberately local in focus. "I'm not running on a national platform," he said. "I'm running on what's going on in Tucson." He argued that flipping even one more seat to Republican control would break the board's current unanimity with the city — what he called "a love fest" — and open the door to real floor debate on ideas like the "15-minute city" concept he says doesn't fit a geographically sprawling desert region built around cars, not subways. Voters can find him at roadsfordistrict5.com.
Gary Garcia Snyder: Securing LD23 and the Border It Runs Along
Legislative District 23 stretches from roughly half of Yuma County down to the border towns of San Luis and Somerton, east through Ajo and Gila Bend, and into the south side of Tucson — one of the largest legislative districts in the state by land area. Republican candidate Gary Garcia Snyder, who lives at the border in San Luis, joined the show to make the case for turning out voters in a district where Republicans have a shot at winning both House seats.
Snyder, a longtime election-integrity activist who worked alongside Kathleen Winn uncovering ballot harvesting in San Luis, said the district's political engagement has to be rooted in something bigger than party label. "This is not about a political party," he said. "This is about the United States and our foundations." He voiced support for ballot measures requiring voter ID, framing citizenship-only voting as a matter of basic election integrity rather than partisanship.
On border security, Snyder credited President Trump directly for restoring order to a stretch of the border that had been overwhelmed under the prior administration. He described conditions in Yuma County before the crackdown: emergency rooms so strained by migrants crossing illegally that local residents were sometimes redirected to Phoenix for care, unable to get treatment in their own community. "Our resources were depleted," Snyder said. "The illegal criminals are not coming through here" now, he added, crediting the administration's enforcement posture.
Snyder also detailed a local environmental fight he helped lead: for years, a Yuma County agriculture company had been applying biosolids — treated sewage waste trucked in from the San Francisco area — to farmland, producing fly infestations and persistent odors that residents said worsened over the past five to ten years. What started as a nonpartisan community complaint grew into a sustained advocacy campaign, and this week state officials ruled to cut the state land trust arrangement that had allowed the practice to continue. Snyder noted the same operation had been eyeing expansion into Pima County, where open land and air pathways on the south side would have made conditions worse. "We're not going to have to deal with this in Pima County," he said, "and you don't have to deal with it in Yuma County anymore." Snyder, who farms himself, said the majority of local farmers never used the biosolids and saw no disadvantage for it. "You can't change the way of life," he said, "because you're not just the only farmer in the county."
Dave Smith: What America Forgot in the 25 Years Since September 11th
On the 25th anniversary of the attacks, longtime law enforcement trainer and counterterrorism instructor Dave Smith — who, with his wife and fellow trainer Betsy Brantner Smith, has spent decades teaching "Street Survival" seminars across the country — argued the nation has drifted back into the same naivety about Islamic terrorism that preceded 9/11.
Smith placed the attacks in a longer arc of warning signs largely dismissed by the public: the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which came close to toppling a tower through explosives placed near weight-bearing structures; the Marine barracks bombing years earlier; and what Smith described as an American cultural instinct, reinforced by comparative-religion coursework common in universities at the time, to treat all faiths as fundamentally equivalent. "It was very Kumbaya," Smith said of the pre-9/11 mindset. "And since 9/11, we've apparently decided to double down on our naivete."
Smith shared a personal connection to the day: the evening before the attacks, he and his wife Betsy were training NYPD officers at a use-of-force conference in Calgary, including one instructor stationed at the base of the World Trade Center. That colleague survived only because she was still in Canada that morning rather than at her post. The experience, Smith said, pushed him and Betsy into a career of teaching counterterrorism to law enforcement nationwide.
Smith was sharply critical of airport security built in the attacks' aftermath, citing internal testing showing a roughly 90% failure rate for TSA screening. "We spend millions and millions to build security theater instead of effective security," he said, arguing the country has consistently underinvested in substantive protection while over-investing in visible bureaucracy. He connected this directly to border policy under the Biden administration, expressing particular alarm about the number of unaccompanied migrants who evaded apprehension entirely — "gotaways," in enforcement parlance — despite easier legal pathways being available. "Why would they do that?" Smith asked. "That's what terrifies me."
Much of Smith's commentary focused on what he characterized as Islam's political dimension rather than treating it purely as a private faith, framing the "submission" meaning of the word itself as central to understanding groups from al-Qaeda and the Taliban to Hamas and the Houthis. He argued the ideology's core demand — that non-Muslim influence be expelled from the region and eventually from any territory where Muslims hold political power — traces to Osama bin Laden's 1996 declaration against American troops in Arabia, a document Smith said predates 9/11 by five years and outlines the same logic driving conflicts today. "They're all about minority rights till they're the majority," Smith said, "then all of a sudden they don't recognize minority rights."
Smith also weighed in on New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani's appearance at this year's Ground Zero ceremony, watching footage in real time of Mamdani shaking former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's hand. "I don't care what anybody says," Smith said. "Mamdani is a co-conspirator" — a characterization tied to Mamdani's history of criticism of U.S. foreign policy and past commentary Smith and others on the right have described as sympathetic to America's adversaries.
Smith closed by urging listeners to recover what he called the "September 12th, 2001 mindset" — a heightened, sober awareness of vulnerability in critical infrastructure from water systems to rail lines to airports, paired with active pressure on elected officials to take security seriously rather than treating it as settled business. "We have to be cautious," Smith said. "We have to be aware. We have to be prepared."
Jack Dona: A Firsthand Account From Inside the Intelligence Response
Retired Army Master Sergeant Jack Dona — whose late father, Master Sergeant Orlando Dona, is the namesake of Arizona's Stolen Valor Act — was on assignment with the National Security Agency at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii on the morning of September 11, 2001, six hours behind New York time. His father woke him with a phone call before dawn Hawaii time: "Jack, Jack, it's me, Dad. We're under attack."
Dona and a colleague, both attached to the Joint Intelligence Center Pacific, were pulled off training status and placed under direct operational control within minutes of the second tower being struck. As intelligence volume overwhelmed processing capacity on the mainland, the team relocated to Field Station Kunia — one of the largest signals intelligence hubs in the world — where they remained locked down, tracking real-time developments for three to four days before returning to their hotel. Waikiki, Dona said, had emptied entirely; with all flights grounded and fear that Hawaii itself could be targeted, tourists had fled the island in a rush to reach the mainland. Dona didn't speak to his father again for nearly two weeks.
Dona connected the day's events directly to present-day politics, framing the last two years of the current administration's efforts to reverse the prior four years as insufficient time to fully repair what he called institutional compromise — including what he described as people sympathetic to America's adversaries still embedded in Congress and federal agencies. "This country right now is broken," Dona said, "and what we forestalled 25 years ago could just as easily happen again this week." His prescription for that threat was electoral rather than confrontational: "The only thing you don't have to raise a gun, you don't have to raise a bullet — you have to raise a pen and you have to go vote."
Dona also recounted a detail from that day that's largely faded from public memory: astronaut Frank Culbertson, the only American off the planet on September 11th, watched the attacks unfold from the International Space Station and radioed a message of solidarity to Mission Control as he observed the smoke over the East Coast. Dona paired that with a story from the Pentagon response — footage he watched live of an elderly man helping carry an injured colleague out of the burning building, who Dona identified as then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld working alongside first responders rather than directing from a distance.
Dona closed by connecting the anniversary to current foreign policy, specifically concerns about Iran. "We don't want a nuclear device coming into one of our ports from Iran in a shipping container," he said, arguing the country needs to unite behind current negotiations from a position of strength rather than division. "We are the light," Dona said. "We are the example to the world. Our enemies hate us. Our enemies envy us. They're here inside the wall now. They're inside. They're trying to subvert us. But we still remain."