Tempe City Council has an election starting in a month. Here's what the candidates promise
Tempe’s five City Council candidates fielded questions in two election forums this week on everything from casitas and homelessness to whether Tempe is too friendly with developers.
The candidates are hoping to sway residents to vote for them during the March 12 election. Early voting begins when ballots are mailed out on Feb. 14.
The majority of Tempe’s seven-person governing body will be on the ballot. Mayor Corey Woods is running for a second term unopposed, but the race for three open council seats is shaping up to be competitive.
Incumbent Councilmembers Randy Keating and Doreen Garlid are vying for a third and second term in office, respectively. A third council position is vacant because Councilmember Joel Navarro decided not to seek reelection after 16 years, opting to pursue a Maricopa County Board of Supervisors position.
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The challengers include:
Nikki Amberg, who works as a public relations consultant for nonprofits and political organizations. Amberg has served on the Tempe Community Council Board, on PTO boards for multiple local schools and has worked in Tempe’s city government as a council aide to Vice Mayor Jennifer Adams.
David Lucier, a former Green Beret who has led the nonprofit Arizona Veterans and Military Leadership Alliance since 2012. He’s also served in many city and community organizations, such as the Planning Area Advisory Board, and has been sharply critical of Tempe’s current approach to development and traffic enforcement.
Hugo Tapia is a school psychologist for the Tempe Union High School District. He immigrated from Mexico at 13, received his doctorate from Arizona State University and previously worked for the city as a youth and family therapist.
All of the contenders met twice this week, once on Tuesday at the Tempe History Museum and again on Wednesday at Tempe Center for the Arts, to answer voters’ questions about where they stand on some of the city’s biggest issues.
Here are the highlights:
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Mitigating homelessness
Residents said reducing homelessness was their top priority for the city during Tempe’s 2023 community survey. The issue has become increasingly visible over the past two years, particularly after Tempe cleared as many as 200 homeless individuals from the Rio Salado river bottom in the summer and fall of 2022.
Tempe claims some progress. The city’s most recent point-in-time count of homeless individuals showed a drop by about a third from 515 in August 2022, to 355 last June. But the vast majority of residents still feel unsafe at nighttime in city parks.
Keating said he wanted to boost funding to the local nonprofit Tempe Community Council to help further the city’s efforts to combat homelessness. He said Tempe’s contribution to that group “hasn’t been upped in 20 years,” and recommended tying the funding amount to inflation.
He and Garlid also touted homelessness initiatives they’ve supported during their council tenures and said expanding them was key. They pointed to the city’s CARE 7 line that residents can call to have staffers sent out to help homeless individuals, the HOPE team that proactively tries to get people off the streets and Tempe’s revived park ranger program.
“We have to get CARE 7 and the HOPE team up there more often and try to get people out of the cycle of homelessness and into the very good city programs that we have,” Keating said, referring to the Tempe Works program that he claims has helped hundreds of residents get employed.
Both Tapia and Amberg said they believe Tempe needs to improve its collaboration with different types of partners.
Tapia focused on boosting the city’s efforts to work with nonprofits, saying “the city cannot do this alone. We have been trying and we’ve been making strides, but I think we can make such a big difference if we develop a much more collaborative effort with all of those nonprofits who are doing really great work.”
Amberg focused on partnering with nearby cities like Scottsdale, Mesa and Phoenix “because as many people as we can get off the streets in the city of Tempe, there’s more in the surrounding cities and they’re just going to come here.”
“Unless we start working together with our surrounding communities, I’m not sure we’re going to make a lasting dent,” she added.
Lucier agreed that the city should “bring all of the stakeholders” affected by homelessness together to craft a complete solution, rather than just enforcing piecemeal policies.
The former Green Beret said getting people housed is an achievable goal, that he’s done it before through his nonprofit work and that it’s “a matter of will."
“I was involved in a great (housing) model here in Tempe, Valor on Eighth, affordable housing for veterans. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to do that tenfold,” he said. “I don’t think enforcement on its own is really much of an answer. I think (it’s about) comprehensive strategies that really help take the homeless off the street towards self-sufficiency and success.”
Casitas as a housing solution
All of the candidates agreed creating more affordable housing in the city is central to addressing the homelessness problem and ensuring Tempe residents are not boxed out of the market.
They were also on the same page that Tempe has to “get into the business of workforce and affordable housing because the free market isn’t going to do it,” as Lucier put it.
That's the goal of an existing city program called Hometown for All. The idea is that city involvement is necessary because private developers are not building cheap housing and city control of those units will ensure they remain low-cost.
But there was more disagreement over specific housing solutions, especially over loosening city rules on casitas, which are tiny homes often used to house elderly relatives or young family members who can’t afford their own place.
The structures are built on the same property as a larger, main house. They’re one way to increase the housing stock in built-out places like Tempe because they can be rented out and don’t require an empty lot.
Only about 250 properties in Tempe are currently eligible for casitas, but city staffers recently began efforts to expand that access to as many as 29,800 properties. Specifics haven’t been worked out yet.
Tapia, Amberg, Garlid and Keating all signaled that they would support an expansion if it were properly crafted with appropriate guardrails in place.
All but Tapia said they wanted to make sure the properties didn’t turn into short-term rentals and that casitas would only be approved where they wouldn’t increase traffic issues or where residents feel they would clash with the appearance of their neighborhoods.
Tapia focused on ensuring developers didn’t simply buy up eligible lots to squeeze more renters onto a single property and fleece them for cash. He said, “the discussion should be about how we are going to make sure that it is affordable housing, that it’s not predatory renting.”
”We have to really take a hold of that issue from the get go,” he added.
Lucier was the only candidate who couldn’t back a casitas expansion. He doubted that Tempe could enforce it properly, even if protections against short-term rentals were included in the updated policy, citing what he considers Tempe’s lackluster enforcement on other issues.
“It was very clear that the shortcoming of that (casitas) plan was enforcement. Do we enforce Airbnb's? No. Do we enforce parking in some of our neighborhoods? No. Do we enforce traffic violations, speeding? No,” he said. “So, until we come up with a plan that says how we’re going to enforce it, I’m not for it.”
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Tempe’s development approach challenged
Lucier is the only staunch limited development candidate for Tempe City Council. He has repeatedly said Tempe had “lost its North Star” and criticized the city for approving what he calls “irresponsible” big dollar and high-density projects, like the failed Coyotes stadium proposal.
He has clashed with more pro-development candidates like Keating, Garlid and Amberg on issues like General Plan 2050, which will also be on the March ballot. If approved, it would allow taller and denser developments to crop up in Tempe’s historically more suburban southern half.
All of the candidates agreed that voters should pass the plan, but Lucier was the only one who argued that Tempe shouldn’t make off-the-cuff exceptions to the proposal later to invite big developments.
The others pointed out that a supermajority of council votes is needed in order to change an adopted General Plan and said there needs to be room for amendments on a case-by-case basis.
Lucier accused the city of being too loose with such tweaks and prioritizing the needs of developers. He said Tempe needs “to get back on track and start serving the residents of the city as opposed to serving future residents and developers.”
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“The city gives away variances like it was water,” Lucier said. “Developers rule (over the city). That has to stop. It’s ruining neighborhoods and it’s killing the livability of our city.”
Keating disagreed with Lucier’s stance that Tempe shouldn’t seek out a large new project for the still-empty Coyotes project site. The 46-acre city-owned property used to be a landfill, so officials expect it will cost Tempe tens of millions of dollars to clean up, which Keating said requires the city to find a development that will have a significant economic impact.
Keating also pointed out that large-scale developments are what enable Tempe is to fund efforts to secure city-controlled affordable housing units. He cited the Hometown for All initiative, which uses donations from builders and a portion of developer permit fees to fund permanent, city-controlled affordable housing units.
“Hometown for All is funded directly by development. Every time there’s a new development in the city of Tempe, they pay a fee schedule that goes into that pot that we use to do good things,” Keating said.
The council candidates will gather two more times to answer resident questions before early voting begins. The next forum will be at 6 p.m. on Jan. 30 at Arizona Community Church. The final one will be at the Tempe History Museum at 6 p.m. on Feb. 7.
Tempe 1st, a political action committee that has endorsed both Lucier and Tapia, is also hosting a candidate forum on Jan. 28 at 3 p.m. The event wasn't included in an official list of candidate forums sent out by the city and it's unclear how many contenders will attend.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Tempe City Council contenders on casitas, housing and development
