I’ve spent a lot of hours this year talking to candidates, residents, and community leaders. I want to tell you what I hear, and why I think this election matters more than those before it.
I love this town. That’s not a line; it’s the reason ILoveOV.com exists. I care about the character of Oro Valley, the safety of our neighborhoods, the quality of our streets and Pusch Ridge – which I look at every day. OV is a place people choose and stay. None of that is up for negotiation. And this article is not about who deserves your vote. Loving a place also means being honest about it, and the honest truth is that Oro Valley has a money problem, and it’s bigger than any single election cycle has admitted. I readily admit I do not know all the behind-the-scenes plans.
The numbers don’t lie
Construction tax revenue, the fuel that built this town for four decades, was down 30 percent between June 2024 and June 2025, its lowest point since 2016. Sales tax revenue is flattening. State shared revenue is shrinking. Gas tax income is sliding as more residents drive electric vehicles. Meanwhile, pavement maintenance costs have more than doubled in four years, from $1.5 million to over $3.1 million annually. The town’s own finance department has plainly called this a structural deficit in public meetings: expenses growing faster than income, year over year, with no natural correction in sight.
To be fair, the state hasn’t ignored the gas tax problem entirely. Arizona already charges electric vehicle owners a separate annual fee, currently in the $135 to $147 range, specifically to make up for the 18-cent-a-gallon gas tax they don’t pay, with revenue flowing into the same Highway User Revenue Fund that helps pay for our roads. But it’s a flat fee, not tied to how much someone drives, and lawmakers have failed for years to pass anything more precise, like a per-mile charge tied to actual road use. There’s also a ballot measure headed to Arizona voters this November that would permanently bar state and local governments from ever creating a mileage-based fee. If that passes, one of the more exact tools for closing this gap is off the table for good, which means the shortfall is likely ours to solve locally, one more reason Oro Valley can’t just wait on Phoenix to fix this for us.
There is a piece of this I hadn’t fully appreciated until the town published it: retail leakage, meaning money residents spend outside Oro Valley instead of inside it. A study the town commissioned found that Oro Valley residents spent $1.18 billion at restaurants and retailers outside town limits in a single year, generating 13.4 million shopping and dining trips elsewhere. Some of that we can’t help. We have zero car dealerships here, so 100 percent of the roughly $196 million residents spend on vehicles leaks out automatically. The town estimates the total leakage cost is $17.2 million in sales tax revenue it never collected, on a general fund that leans on sales tax for close to half its income. That’s not money lost to some distant economic force. It is money OV residents are already spending, just not here, and it’s one of the more realistic opportunities in front of us. Bring in the specific retailers, restaurants, and services that keep more of that spending home, without needing a single new acre of land.
There’s a demographic piece too. Oro Valley skews older, and older residents use more medical and professional services, spending that supports real jobs but generates almost no local sales tax. We do collect tax on the electricity and water flowing into those clinics and offices. We collect nothing on the services themselves. That’s part of why the council took up three new taxes on commercial leases, telecommunications, and out-of-jurisdiction business purchases on January 14, 2026, in packages staff estimated could bring in $930,000 to $1.88 million a year combined. The council, on a vote of 4-3, approved only one of the three, a 2.5 percent use tax on large untaxed purchases made outside town, expected to generate $375,000 to $600,000 annually. It rejected the telecommunications and commercial rental taxes outright. Mayor Winfield voted in the positive for all three, while council members including Melanie Barrett and Mary Murphy voted against them, with Murphy arguing the town should look at its own efficiency first. That split vote is the same tension running through this whole election: whether we treat the revenue problem as urgent, or as something that can wait another year.
Here’s the part that concerns me more than any single tax vote: Oro Valley is running out of land. Decades of growth, and the tax base that came with it, were built on new rooftops and new retail. That model is approaching its natural end. The Arizona Office of Economic Opportunity projects our population growth flattening out around 2040. When that happens, the old playbook-annex more land, build more houses, collect more construction tax-simply won’t be there anymore.
Annexation isn’t the easy answer some people think it is
A number of decision-makers and residents see annexation as the fix, and it may be part of the answer. But that path is harder than it may sound. Any land Oro Valley annexes has to pencil out: it must generate enough sales tax or other revenue to outweigh the added cost of roads, water lines, and police coverage. Annexation that adds rooftops and expenses without a matching commercial base would deepen the deficit rather than solve it. It is also slow, often requiring years of negotiation and legal review, with no guarantee it will happen at all.
What most people don’t realize is that the benefits of an offer aren’t fixed. Every annexation the town has completed was negotiated separately, and the details of what a property gets in return typically aren’t public until the deal is close to done. When Oro Valley annexed the Westward Look Resort, the resort didn’t get a tax break; it got something more valuable: rezoning that opened roughly 20 acres of previously vacant land to apartments, offices, restaurants, and shops it couldn’t build under county zoning, plus the town taking over maintenance of the adjacent roadway and a protected open space concession that satisfied nearby neighbors. None of that was obvious going in. It came out of months of negotiation specific to that property and that owner. The lesson isn’t that every deal looks like Westward Look’s. It’s that the town has real tools beyond tax rates, like zoning flexibility, infrastructure commitments, and service upgrades that can make annexation genuinely worth a business’s while. But only if our leaders are willing to sit down and build the right package for the right property.
The annexation area most often mentioned is Ina and Oracle, home to Casas Adobes Plaza and its anchor, Whole Foods. On paper, it looks close to ideal. The retail is already built, already generating sales tax, and public safety coverage wouldn’t require standing up something new, since OVPD already operates under an Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) with the Pima County Sheriff’s Office in that area. That keeps the cost of annexing it modest compared to raw land. But modest cost for the town doesn’t answer the harder question: what’s in it for Whole Foods, or any other business in that corridor, to want to become part of Oro Valley? Annexation doesn’t just bring us new tax revenue; it also means a business has to adjust to a new jurisdiction, new licensing, and many new rules and regulations, with no obvious upside on their end. If we want that annexation to happen, our next mayor and council need to do the same work done with Westward Look: sit down, figure out what that specific property needs, and build a case.
Why I think the growth-versus-no-growth fight is the wrong fight
None of this means Oro Valley should throw open the gates to any developer with a checkbook. But it does mean we can’t afford a council that treats every development proposal as a threat to be managed instead of a potential partner in solving a real budget problem. The debate this winter over the vacant parcel at Oracle Road and Pusch View Lane was a preview of exactly this tension: one side wanted commercial development that could grow the tax base, the other worried about what that growth would look like. The council split the difference and chose neither path decisively, which is itself a kind of answer, and not a reassuring one.
Staying the course isn’t neutral. Standing still while costs rise and growth-era revenue disappears is its own choice, and it’s the one choice this town genuinely cannot afford. I want a mayor and council willing to sit down with anyone reasonable. Be that developers, medical employers, or the business community, and ask a straightforward question: what does it take to bring in operations here that create real income for this town, without turning Oro Valley into something we don’t recognize? That’s not a betrayal of what makes this town what it is. It’s the only realistic way to keep paying for it.
What can’t be on the table
Safety. Roads. Core services. These aren’t line items to trim when the budget gets tight. They’re the reason we live here in the first place. A council that balances the books by letting pavement crumble or by thinning out police staffing isn’t solving anything. It’s just moving the cost to next year and calling it a win today. Finding new revenue isn’t about growing government for its own sake. It’s about protecting what we already depend on without pretending the old funding model still works, which means staying open to ideas and approaches that don’t look like anything the town has tried before.
What I’ll be watching on July 21
This year’s ballot has an open mayoral seat, since Mayor Joe Winfield isn’t seeking a third term, contested between Melanie Barrett and Mark Napier, plus three Town Council seats among a field that includes Rosa Dailey, Jake Herrington, Christopher DeSimone, Rhonda Pina, and Matt Wood. ILoveOV sent all seven candidates the same ten questions on growth, water, and town finances. Some answered in detail. Some didn’t respond at all. That alone tells me something about who’s ready to engage with the hardest question facing this town.
I’m not telling you to vote. But the candidates who deserve serious consideration aren’t the ones promising to hold the line, nor the ones promising to build anything, anywhere. They’re the candidates who can tell you, specifically, where they think new income is going to come from once the land runs out, and who are willing to work with anyone, developers included, who can help answer that honestly. Our future isn’t going to be funded by nostalgia for how things used to work. It’s going to be funded by whoever has the imagination and the will to build the next revenue model before the current one runs dry.
I care deeply about this town staying the place we all fell in love with. I also know that takes money, and pretending otherwise doesn’t protect Oro Valley; it just puts off the reckoning. Read the candidate answers, ask your own questions, and vote like the town’s future depends on it, because right now, it does.
Have thoughts, corrections, or a different view? I’d like to hear it. Email me at editor@ILoveOV.com.
Michael Burns
Publisher, ILoveOV.com
*Read the full candidate Q&A at ILoveOV’s 2026 Election page, and see where each candidate stands on growth, water, and town finances before you vote.*
## References
– AZPM, “Tax debate in Oro Valley signals the end of a high-growth era,” January 2026: https://news.azpm.org/p/azpmnews/2026/1/15/228000-tax-debate-in-oro-valley-signals-the-end-of-a-high-growth-era/
– KGUN9, “Oro Valley residents spent $1.18 billion elsewhere in 2024, study shows”: https://www.kgun9.com/news/community-inspired-journalism/oro-valley/oro-valley-residents-spent-1-18-billion-elsewhere-in-2024-study-shows
– Tucson Local Media, “Oro Valley ‘leakage’ at $1.185 billion”: https://www.tucsonlocalmedia.com/explorernews/news/oro-valley-leakage-at-1-185-billion/article_eddedf44-d3a5-4e41-914c-91a55a2e5bc4.html
– Town of Oro Valley, Retail and Restaurant Leakage Analysis, Economic Development: https://www.chooseorovalley.com/News-articles/Oro-Valley-Retail-and-Restaurant-Leakage-Analysis
– PICOR/C&W, “Support Local or Tax Local? The Hidden Cost of Oro Valley’s Proposed Rental Tax,” December 2025: https://blog.picor.com/support-local-or-tax-local-the-hidden-cost-of-oro-valleys-proposed-rental-tax/
– Inside Tucson Business, “Supporting local businesses strengthens Oro Valley,” commentary, May 2026: https://www.insidetucsonbusiness.com/commentary/supporting-local-businesses-strengthens-oro-valley/article_691651b4-bdd3-43e8-bc83-0d8e4de7f27e.html
– Town of Oro Valley, Annexation, Town Manager’s Office: https://www.orovalleyaz.gov/Government/Departments/Town-Managers-Office/Annexation
– Tucson Local Media, “Welcome to OV, Westward Look!” May 2021: https://www.tucsonlocalmedia.com/local_business_news/welcome-to-ov-westward-look/article_57a89158-bcb2-11eb-bf53-9f25f2a3a6d8.html
– Arizona Capitol Times, “2026 ballot measure would ban tax or fee on vehicle miles traveled,” July 2025: https://azcapitoltimes.com/news/2025/07/07/2026-ballot-measure-would-ban-tax-or-fee-on-vehicle-miles-traveled/
– Ballotpedia, “Arizona Prohibit Taxes or Fees on Miles Traveled in Motor Vehicle Amendment (2026)”: https://ballotpedia.org/Arizona_Prohibit_Taxes_or_Fees_on_Miles_Traveled_in_Motor_Vehicle_Amendment_(2026)
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