Local opinion: Tucson should reject Prop. 421 and explore public power

On Nov. 3, Tucson voters won't just be deciding a franchise renewal. They'll be deciding whether TEP keeps collecting hundreds of millions of dollars a year from this city forever, or whether that money starts building something Tucson could own outright: the world's model Solar City. A group calling itself the Southern Arizona Energy Alliance recently urged a yes vote on Proposition 421, calling it a matter of reliability and affordability rather than politics. Look past that framing and the real stakes come into focus.

Start with the smaller claim. SAEA says Prop 421 “won't impact electric bills.” That's true only because the franchise ordinance itself carries no rate language, a technicality that ignores the rate case TEP has pending right now before the Arizona Corporation Commission: roughly $172 million in additional annual revenue, a 13% hike, with the Attorney General's office arguing it should be closer to 4%. Bills are very much on the table this year. They're just being negotiated somewhere else.

The bigger number is the one Prop 421 is designed to keep off the table altogether. TEP's parent, Fortis Inc. of St. John's, Newfoundland, extracted $437 million in profit from Tucson ratepayers in 2025 alone, 25.5^ of Fortis's entire global earnings, and Fortis has told its own investors it plans to grow that figure 4-6% a year. The Energy Collaboration Agreement offers Tucson $2 million a year for 25 years as a consolation prize. Have the city acquire TEP outright instead, and that $437 million a year, growing every year, stops leaving for Canada and becomes the down payment on Tucson's own power system.

That's the acquisition Prop 421's fine print is built to prevent. Buried in the Energy Collaboration Agreement is a clause letting TEP cancel the deal and keep the payment the moment Tucson moves toward buying its own utility, a financial tripwire aimed at foreclosing exactly the option that matters most. It's worth asking why.

A feasibility analysis of municipal acquisition shows that recaptured $437 million a year, bonded against Tucson's own credit, can finance the acquisition AND full clean-energy transition on its own, including solar canopies and battery storage built over the roughly 3,800 acres of parking lots and pavement Tucson already owns, generating an estimated 4,250 gigawatt-hours a year, close to half of what TEP produces today.

No city of our size anywhere has run the numbers on turning its own parking lots into a power plant at that scale. Tucson could be the one that builds it and becomes the world's model Solar City in the process, the place other cities study when they ask how this is done.

None of this requires Tucson to go dark while it sorts things out. TEP's existing franchise terms continue in force while any new agreement is negotiated, so the lights and the city's leverage both stay on. A no vote doesn't strand anyone in permitting purgatory. It refuses to trade away, for a fraction of the money at stake, the one option that actually solves the affordability problem for good.

Prop 421 asks Tucson to keep renting its power from Canada for 25 more years in exchange for pocket change. The bigger, better answer is already on the table: acquire TEP, keep the $437 million a year and its own built-in growth at home, and use it to build the model Solar City the rest of the country and world will be studying. That future starts with a no vote on Proposition 421 come Nov. 3.