Guests - Joe Salkowski, Bob Olson, Katey McPhearson
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Prop 421: Why TEP's Franchise Renewal Isn't the Fight Some Voters Think It Is
Tucson voters are about to decide on a ballot measure that sounds like it grants Tucson Electric Power something new. It doesn't. Joe Salkowski, TEP's Senior Director of Communications and Public Affairs, joined the show to untangle what Proposition 421 actually does — and why the confusing ballot language is doing the measure no favors.
Prop 421 renews the franchise agreement between TEP and the City of Tucson, a routine arrangement that governs how the utility accesses public rights-of-way — streets, alleys, easements — to install, maintain, and repair its equipment. TEP has operated under some version of this agreement for as long as anyone at the company can recall; the current one has been in place for 25 years, and a prior agreement existed before that. "We can't find anyone who remembers a period of time in which our company was operating without a franchise agreement in the city of Tucson," Salkowski said.
The ballot description doesn't help voters understand any of this. It states that Prop 421 would "grant a franchise for electric transmission and distribution" to TEP — language that makes it sound like the company is being handed new authority to operate in the city. It isn't. TEP's actual authority to serve customers comes from the state, through a certificate of convenience and necessity issued by the Arizona Corporation Commission, which also regulates the company's rates. The franchise agreement covers none of that. "This is not about rates. It isn't about a lot of other things," Salkowski said, calling it essentially a service and maintenance agreement dressed in franchise-agreement language because state law requires that terminology on the ballot.
What the agreement actually buys the city and its residents is speed. Without it, TEP crews responding to storm damage, downed lines, or blown poles — the kind of outages that spike during monsoon season or high-wind events — would need to seek city permits before making repairs in public rights-of-way, adding delay to situations where delay has real consequences. "Especially in the middle of the summer," Salkowski noted, when a slower repair response isn't a minor inconvenience but a public safety issue. "Air conditioning is not a convenience," he said. "It is, in some cases, a matter of life and death," pointing to the thousands of heat-related deaths in Europe this past summer among a population without widespread access to reliable cooling.
Voting no doesn't touch TEP's rate structure, and it doesn't change who provides electric service in Tucson — TEP remains the sole provider under its state-issued authority either way. What a no vote does is strip away the streamlined permitting process the franchise agreement provides, adding a layer of bureaucratic friction to an already complex logistical operation: crews juggling multiple simultaneous outages, prioritizing repairs, managing heavy equipment dispatch, all while now also waiting on city sign-off for work in public rights-of-way. "We don't want our service and our operations to create an additional burden for city staff," Salkowski said, noting the agreement benefits city government as much as it benefits TEP by giving both sides confidence that repair work meets pre-approved standards.
On the financial side, Salkowski was direct: Prop 421 does not raise electric rates or add a new fee to anyone's bill. The current agreement carries a 2.25% franchise fee already built into customer bills, which offsets the city's separate 5% utility tax — meaning if the franchise expires, that fee simply gets absorbed into a larger utility tax bill, with customers paying the same total either way. What they'd lose is the operational benefit the franchise fee is meant to purchase. Combined, franchise fee and utility tax revenue send roughly $30 million a year to city coffers regardless of the vote's outcome.
If voters approve the measure, TEP has separately agreed to contribute $2 million annually to the city, growing 2% each year over the 25-year term, earmarked for heat-resilience projects — additional shade trees in underserved neighborhoods, energy efficiency upgrades for lower-income households and city facilities, and related sustainability investments. None of that funding is contingent on higher rates; it comes at no additional cost to customers.
The measure only appears on ballots for voters within Tucson city limits — residents of Oro Valley, Marana, Vail, Sahuarita, and other parts of TEP's broader service territory won't see it, even though the company's infrastructure and repair capacity serve the whole region without regard to municipal boundaries. Salkowski urged listeners outside the city to make sure friends and family who do live in Tucson understand what's at stake. Notably, TEP already operates under a similar agreement with Pima County — one with no expiration date at all, negotiated on the premise that reliable utility service is a standing community interest that shouldn't require repeated ballot renewal. "Pima County got this one right," Salkowski said.
Absent a specific complaint about the substance of the agreement, Salkowski said the only real risk to Prop 421's passage is voters using it as a proxy protest against TEP over unrelated grievances — rate frustration chief among them — a habit he warned would backfire on the very people casting that protest vote. "This actually has the opposite effect," he said, "because a franchise agreement is one of the ways that we can control costs and avoid expenditures that could result later in higher rates." The current agreement expires in April 2027.
Bob Olson: Remembering Charlie Kirk, One Year Later
On the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk's assassination, longtime friend and mentor Bob Olson called in from Florida to talk about the young man he met when Kirk was 22 — and the political legacy he left behind.
Olson, who texted with Kirk daily and helped connect him to Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn, credited Kirk with one of the most consequential — and least recognized — accomplishments of his career: helping elect Ron DeSantis governor of Florida in 2018. After the Arabella Group poured roughly $40 million into electing Democrat Andrew Gillum, Olson said he and his wife contributed to a counter-effort Kirk ran, matching and tripling their donation with his own money to fund a targeted social media campaign reaching Black and Hispanic mothers with school-age children in Orlando and Broward County. DeSantis won by roughly 34,000 votes. "Ron DeSantis wouldn't have become governor if it wasn't for that demographic," Olson said.
Kirk repeated the playbook in 2024, Olson said, this time targeting Democrat-leaning voters — Black and Hispanic women in Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta — with a single beta-tested message asking whether they supported biological males competing in women's sports and using women's locker rooms. The blind text campaign generated a response rate near 24%, against a typical response rate of 2-3%. "It was a God thing," Olson said, "and it's also an 80-20 issue."
Olson also described his role introducing Kirk to Hillsdale's Larry Arnn — a sales job, he said, that took two years, since Arnn initially wanted nothing to do with the young author of College Is a Scam. The relationship that eventually formed became central to Kirk's intellectual development; Olson recalled fielding nightly calls from Kirk reporting on Hillsdale courses he'd just completed, which Olson would then relay back to Arnn. Kirk's origin story, Olson said, traces to a chance encounter in a stairwell at the 2012 Republican National Convention, where 18-year-old Kirk introduced himself to GOP donor Foster Friess and walked away with the first $10,000 check that got Turning Point USA off the ground — an organization co-founded with the help of Bill Montgomery that has since grown from a few hundred college chapters to roughly 1,500 campuses and 3,400 Turning Point Clubs in high schools nationwide.
Beyond the political organizing, Olson emphasized what he called Kirk's evolution as a person — from a purely political activist into a husband, father, and man of faith, largely through the influence of his wife, Erica, whom Kirk met while she was applying for a job and, according to Olson, decided he'd rather date than hire. Erica holds a theology degree and later founded Bible in 365, a program guiding people through a full read of scripture over a year. Olson asked listeners for grace toward Erica as she now leads the organization Kirk built. "She is taking an awful lot of bows and arrows coming at her," he said, "just because people, because the size of the organization expects so much."
Olson also detailed the founding of Turning Point Faith, which traces to a phone call shortly after the 2020 election. Concerned that 37% of regular churchgoers hadn't voted, Olson handed Kirk a check and a challenge to mobilize the evangelical community. Kirk, skeptical at first, spent two weeks raising $2 million from donors and then flew to Naples, Florida, with Pastor Rob McCoy to meet with 70 pastors at Covenant Presbyterian Church — the gathering that became Turning Point Faith's starting point.
Closing the conversation, Olson turned to Arizona politics directly, endorsing Andy Biggs for governor as a candidate he believes Kirk would have wanted to see win. "There's just certain people who make good governors," Olson said, drawing a comparison to Florida's Byron Donalds — who Olson noted inherits a DeSantis economy with a budget surplus, while Biggs, in Olson's view, "is inheriting a mess" he expects Biggs to clean up in the mold of former Florida Governor Rick Scott. "It would make Charlie smile," Olson said, "for Andy to become governor of his home state."
Katey McPherson: What National Suicide Prevention Day Means in Arizona This Year
September 10th marks National Suicide Prevention Day, observed alongside World Suicide Prevention Day — and youth advocate Katey McPherson joined the show to talk through why Arizona's youth suicide rate runs high, and what parents and communities can do about it.
McPherson pointed first to firearm access as a leading risk factor, particularly in households where guns aren't securely stored. Nationally, boys die by suicide at roughly five times the rate of girls, even though girls attempt suicide more often — a gap McPherson attributed largely to lethality of method and to a stigma around boys and men discussing their emotions openly. "Girls tend to collapse outward and tell fifteen people," she said, while "boys and men typically tell no one" — a pattern she said holds across the male lifespan, from adolescence into middle age.
McPherson traced a broader erosion in how young people cope with distress, one she said accelerated sharply during COVID — a period that produced a marked rise in eating disorders, anxiety, and depression. She pointed to reduced unstructured play, increased screen time, and a decline in face-to-face connection as compounding factors, alongside a cultural discomfort with even naming suicide as a topic. "Parents are terrified to even say the word suicide," McPherson said, "like if I say it, they're going to get suicidal. That is not true. Actually, talking about suicide is one of the biggest protective factors that you can do for your child."
The conversation turned to two recent losses in Arizona schools this week — one in the Marana area, which advocates including McPherson have described as a suicide, and another in Mesa, where crisis counselors were made available on campus. McPherson urged schools and communities to resist the instinct to minimize or move past these events too quickly, warning of a documented "contagion effect" in which students already struggling with anxiety or depression may see a peer's death as a model rather than a warning. She said she'd reached out to a Marana city council member to encourage a direct, sustained community response rather than a quiet one. "I think city officials sometimes just don't want to deal with this topic," she said. "But I think it is terrifying."
McPherson referenced the story of a woman she knows who attempted suicide as a teenager and survived with permanent injuries; that woman, now 22, travels the country sharing her story as what McPherson called a "live survivor," built around two central messages: silence keeps no one safe, and gratitude is a powerful ally in recovery. "It wasn't that I wanted to die," McPherson said, relaying the woman's account. "It was that I just wanted out of the pain."
Her closing advice to parents, teachers, and friends was direct: if you notice someone struggling, say something. "It may be scary to tell somebody," McPherson said, "but not telling somebody could cost a life."
If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text, 24 hours a day.