Tim Steller’s column: Catholic charity’s power up for vote in South Tucson

At a council meeting, Brian Flagg, who has led the Casa Maria soup kitchen for decades, promoted a “campaign to get rid of the worst slumlord in all of Pima County, Mr. Brian Bowers.”

“We want to have a legal advisor here in the city come and talk about legal ways to get it, but also, we are into raising a bunch of money,” Flagg said, according to a meeting transcript.

“We bought the El Camino Motel, we want to buy all those motels starting with Spanish Trail and South Sixth Avenue Suites. So it’s time for us to kind of like use our capital, our social capital, get that money and like, get rid of Brian Bowers and keep South Tucson from being gentrified.”

The “we” he was referring to was not entirely clear — was it the city of South Tucson, or was it Casa Maria? Or both? The confusion is the symptom of a bigger problem, as some candidates, council members and residents have been telling me. The overlap between the Catholic Worker Movement-aligned charity and the government of South Tucson has only grown since Flagg was elected in 2022.

Then, Flagg was one person in a three-member minority bloc affiliated with Casa Maria on the South Tucson City Council. But in 2024, two more people aligned with the group were elected, effectively giving Casa Maria a five-member majority on the seven-member council, led by Mayor Roxanna Valenzuela and Flagg. One of the newcomers, Pablo Robles, was hired by Casa Maria after winning his council seat.

Now the original three — Valenzuela, Flagg and Cesar Aguirre — are all up for re-election, giving South Tucson voters their first chance to approve or reject the direction those affiliated with the charity have taken the tiny city of 4,600 residents.

“That’s what caused me to run,” candidate Debbie Federico said of Casa Maria’s influence.

Federico, who is running on a slate with Zeke Cook, cited the seven properties owned in South Tucson by Casa Maria and those owned by its sister entity, the Barrios Unidos Land Trust.

“It’s the conflict of interest, and the fact that the city of South Tucson doesn’t own nearly as many properties," she said. 

Eduardo Baca, Christopher Dodson and Diana Moreno-Sears are also running for the three council seats on a separate slate, making it eight candidates for three spots.

Conflicts over properties

The issues of conflict of interest are especially clear in the disputes South Tucson has had with Bowers. Eight months after Flagg publicly stated his interest in acquiring Bowers’ properties, he joined other council members in voting to sue Bowers over the condition of his apartment buildings in the small city.

Viewed from Bowers’ perspective, this looked like people using their public offices to get properties for their private charity. In the end, though, Bowers was able to settle the suits with the city by making improvements at the complexes.

When I presented the question of conflict of interest to Flagg on Thursday, he disputed that description, describing his actions as more like pursuing one vision from all his positions.

“We’re not trying to further the interests of Casa Maria,” he said. “We’re not trying to get gold for Casa Maria. We’re into fighting gentrification.”

One of the ways they decided to do that, even before being elected in 2022, was to raise money to buy property, Flagg said.

“The whole idea of buying properties is to keep them off the speculative market, and that was especially true of the hotels,” Flagg said.

One of the best-known residents of the Casa Maria-owned properties is the mayor, Roxanna Valenzuela, who lives in the Arizona Motel. In South Tucson, the mayor is chosen by the city council from among its seven members, after the council elections every two years, so the seat will be up for reconsideration again this year.

"We set out an agenda to buy or build as much affordable housing as possible,” Valenzuela said. “This is before we were on the council.”

‘Figuring things out as we go’

The motel where she lives was previously a focus of criminal activity but has improved under the charity’s ownership. Valenzuela was working for Casa Maria when she was elected, but now works for the sister entity Barrios Unidos Land Trust.

She acknowledged that for the charity, buying property was a lot easier than making it habitable.

“It’s not like we had experience in development,” Valenzuela said. “We just knew we had to buy as much property, take it off the market and put it in the hands of the community. And so we are figuring things out as we go.”

Behind the motel where the mayor lives, there is a 25-unit trailer park that Casa Maria also owns. Only five units are occupied, and fixing up the infrastructure and units would cost $200,000, Valenzuela said. It’s, plainly, an eyesore.

So is the El Camino Motel, which Casa Maria bought and received a $375,000 Pima County grant to refurbish in December. As a representative of Casa Maria, Mayor Valenzuela signed off on the initial agreement with the county on Oct. 28. On Jan. 28, it was council member Pablo Robles who signed off on an affordability document, as a representative of Casa Maria.

The city of South Tucson has received a complaint about the boarded-up motel, City Manager Veronica Moreno confirmed to me. Under city ordinances, no property is supposed to be boarded up for more than 180 days.

But if people complain about those properties, the complaints will, of course, go to the city of South Tucson, run now by Valenzuela, Flagg, Robles and others affiliated with the charity. And when the charity needs permits to complete work on the properties, it will be the city of South Tucson, run for now by Casa Maria-aligned council members, that issues the permits, or offers forbearance.

As the council runs now, candidate Federico said, “People not aligned with Casa Maria get brushed aside.”

Especially hard times

These questions wouldn’t be so crucial if South Tucson weren’t in such a dire moment right now. The drug addiction epidemic has hit the city hard. In October, the city lost its only supermarket, Food City, a blow not just to customers but also to the city that relied on tax collections from the store.

An optimist might view the city as having hit bottom, meaning the only way to go is up, but there is always room for things to get worse. That’s something candidates and council members reminded me of, several of them warning that Walgreens on South Sixth Avenue could close, cutting off another key shopping site and source of city sales tax revenue.

The owners of many of the famous local restaurants, too, are getting older. The owners of Taqueria Pico de Gallo, for example, are trying to unload the property where the restaurant sits. Those restaurants are key, as well, to the city’s identity and financial health.

While South Tucson has made some strides in public safety, especially by striking a deal with Rural Metro to provide full-time fire service, it still has a desperate need for more tax revenue.

That’s been Cook’s focus as he campaigns for a council seat.

“The budget is so fragile,” he said. “These guys have no plans to bring more revenue in.”

One lingering question is why anyone with money would invest it there.

Melissa Brown-Dominguez, one of the two current council members not aligned with Casa Maria, worries that outsiders will look at the way government operates and decide not to.

“Everybody sees what happens here,” she said. “That can hurt us in a lot of ways.”