TUCSON, Ariz. (KGUN) — In a special meeting of the City Council Tuesday at the Tucson Convention Center, Mayor Regina Romero highlighted recent gains in housing, homelessness response and public health while laying out a suite of next steps that put treatment, shelter and housing production at the center of her agenda.
“My vision for Tucson is of a safe, just and sustainable city that provides economic opportunity for all Tucsonans,” Romero said, opening a speech that praised the city’s progress over the past six years while warning that “we still face tremendous challenges.”
Romero framed much of the progress as the product of coordinated action across city departments, nonprofits and regional partners. She pointed to concrete results in homelessness response: “In the past year, our housing first emergency shelters, street outreach workers, and permanent supportive housing resources have served over 2,000 people that needed a safe place to call home. That's really something to celebrate,” she said.
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Among the initiatives Romero highlighted was the newly launched Star Village safe-sleeping site for women, a pilot she described as showing early promise. “We are just six weeks into our Star Village safe sleeping site… More than 40 individuals have been served. Two have completed the program and moved on to more permanent housing,” she said, thanking partner organizations and staff who run the program.
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Romero also underscored new units and projects intended to increase affordability across income levels: “In 2025, we opened developments like Milagro on Oracle…providing 63 units for seniors. We opened the Amazon Hotel, which provides permanent supportive housing for people experiencing homelessness in 30 refurbished studio apartments.” She added that the city expects to “close on the Tucson House, bringing 400 affordable refurbished units to Tucson” by the end of 2025, and noted additional projects such as Sugar Hill on Stone Apartments and Amazon Flats that will add dozens more affordable units.
Healthcare and addiction treatment were central themes as well. Romero criticized federal policy moves that she said have made life harder for working families — “a president who is making life more unaffordable…by cutting access to health care, to SNAP benefits, to resources for housing” — and emphasized local responses. On opioid response she said the city will direct settlement money toward treatment and diversion: the council has “looks forward to our work…to direct opioid settlement investments to fund real tangible solutions for the public health crisis of fentanyl and opioid addiction on our streets,” Romero said. “We need to use opioid settlement funds to create the detox and treatment services we need, because we all know incarceration is not the goal. Treatment and recovery is.”
Romero described the city’s “safe city initiative” as an umbrella for those efforts: “We can and must continue to offer compassionate care and hold those committing crime in our city accountable,” she said, listing expansions in housing navigation, street outreach, care coordination and crisis response teams. She also announced staffing and enforcement commitments: “We have the goal of adding 50 additional commissioned police officers within the next year alone,” she said, and touted investments in “day trucks to our fire department, bringing video alternatives to jail, and more safe city deployments, and expanded our community courts.”
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On affordability and broader economic resilience, Romero emphasized transit and infrastructure as levers for growth and cost control. “Transit continues to be free, which saves the average family 30% of monthly expenses on transportation,” she said, while urging voter support for a regional transportation measure she argued would fund road and transit improvements and create jobs.
Romero framed the next phase of work as both pragmatic and values-driven. She called for state-level changes — including rent stabilization and more support for affordable home ownership — while reiterating a local commitment to “create more accessible, affordable housing and more economic opportunity and workforce training, especially for our working families and young people here in Tucson.”
Romero also urged Tucson voters to approve the RTA Next measure, calling it “an important step in transportation funding” and warning that “passing the RTA next in March is crucial to the possibility of keeping a safe, free public transit system and lowering response times for our first responders as well as increasing road safety.” Romero outlined specific investments in the proposal — including $140 million for arterial and collector roads, $40 million for streetcar operations, $51 million for transit safety and security and $726 million for regional transit and bus rapid transit — and tied the transit plan to the city’s recent social gains. “In the past year, our housing first emergency shelters, street outreach workers, and permanent supportive housing resources have served over 2,000 people that needed a safe place to call home,” she said, while warning that federal rollbacks are “cutting access to health care, to SNAP benefits, to resources for housing,” and stressing the need to invest locally in care, affordability and recovery.
She closed with an appeal to community values: “I will never stop fighting for the rights, the dignity, the safety of everyone in our community,” Romero said. “In Tucson, we choose community over chaos. We choose compassion over fear, and we choose opportunity over scarcity.”
The mayor’s remarks laid out a mix of near-term pilots and longer-term capital projects intended to reduce unsheltered homelessness, expand treatment and increase the city’s stock of affordable housing. Implementation will hinge on continued coordination with nonprofit partners, county and state officials, and securing the layered funding Romero said the city has used successfully in recent projects.
