Before the Forum
What to Listen For When Marana Candidates Talk About Development, Revenue, and the Pattern Voters Keep Noticing
Candidate forums tend to focus on what people want to hear. Voters arrive frustrated about traffic, water, the next car wash, the next data center, and candidates respond with the answers that map onto those frustrations. Better judgment. Smarter planning. More careful approvals.
These answers are not wrong. They are incomplete.
The pattern that frustrates Marana voters, repetitive retail, large industrial approvals, and a development pipeline that never seems to slow down, is the product of a fiscal structure, not a series of individual decisions. Understanding that structure changes what counts as a serious answer at a candidate forum, and what counts as a deflection.
This guide is meant to help voters listen for the difference.
The Structural Question Behind Every Approval
Marana funds its government almost entirely from two sources: the Transaction Privilege Tax (Arizona’s sales tax) and one-time fees collected during construction. According to Marana’s own FY2024 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report, the Transaction Privilege Tax alone provides roughly 47.5 percent of general fund revenues.
There is no primary property tax. Marana’s budget documents state this directly: “The city/town does not levy property taxes.”
This produces a specific incentive environment. The revenue that funds police, roads, parks, and staff flows reliably only when commercial activity occurs within town limits. The most reliable commercial activity, from a fiscal perspective, is high-volume retail (consistent daily transactions) and active construction (one-time but large). Office employment, professional services, and most forms of economic diversification generate almost no direct revenue for the town, even when they raise incomes, property values, and quality of life.
Why the Pattern Repeats
Three observations follow from the structure.
Retail approvals are a reliable revenue. A car wash, fast-casual restaurant, or big-box retailer generates ongoing taxable transactions every day. A 2 percent local TPT rate applied to twenty million dollars in annual taxable sales produces four hundred thousand dollars a year, every year, indefinitely.
Office and professional employment generates almost no revenue for the town. A two-hundred-employee software firm or medical practice produces wages that flow to state income taxes (not Marana) and spending that flows to wherever those workers actually shop. The town experiences secondary effects (higher housing values, more nearby retail spending), but they are indirect and slow.
Construction events are large, one-time revenue events. Arizona’s 4 percent construction TPT rate, double the retail rate, makes any significant building project a meaningful revenue event for the town. Add in impact fees, and a single large project can generate tens of millions of dollars in a single fiscal year. Once the project is built, the flow stops. To maintain that revenue line, the town must approve the next project.
Data centers fit this pattern at an industrial scale. They produce minimal ongoing TPT (they are not retail), employ a relatively small workforce, but generate enormous one-time construction TPT and impact fees during the build. Inside the current fiscal structure, they are the largest single construction revenue events available.
What This Means for Voters
If the structure produces predictable outcomes, then a candidate’s answers about approval decisions need to address the structure, not just promise different behavior within it. The most useful questions a voter can ask, or listen for, fall into three categories.
On Development Pace
If a candidate proposes slowing or pausing development, the follow-up question is straightforward. Which specific revenue sources replace the construction TPT and impact fees that will not be collected? Over what timeline does that replacement revenue come online, and how is the gap funded during the transition?
If a candidate defends the current pace, the follow-up is equally direct. What is the long-term plan when developable land is substantially built out, and construction TPT naturally declines? What happens in the event of a recession or spending slowdown? Marana occupies 122.4 square miles, much of it constrained by desert, mountains, and floodplains. The developable inventory is finite.
On Revenue Restructuring
The available tools are well defined. Each does specific things and has specific costs.
A use tax (applied to commercial purchases consumed in town but bought elsewhere) is business-facing and relatively low in political friction. Oro Valley is actively proposing one.
A commercial rental tax generates ongoing revenue from existing built commercial inventory rather than depending on new approvals. Tucson levies one. Oro Valley is studying one.
A primary property tax would create a stable revenue floor independent of the development cycle. Based on Marana’s assessed valuation, a modest 50-cent-per-hundred-dollar levy would generate roughly $6.5 to $7.5 million annually, about 7 to 8 percent of the current general fund. For a median Marana homeowner with a $325,000 property, that works out to approximately $12 per month. Marana residents already pay several property tax lines on their annual bills (Northwest Fire District, Marana Unified School District, Pima County, Pima Community College, Central Arizona Water Conservation District), so a Town levy would add one line to a bill residents already receive. It would not displace school funding, which is governed by a separate state equalization formula.
Useful forum question: which of these tools is on the table, which is off, and what is the estimated revenue yield of each proposal?
A platform that proposes no restructuring at all, while also promising different approval outcomes, is asking voters to trust judgment inside a system designed to produce the current results.
On Government Rightsizing
The other side of the equation is what the government costs. Marana’s FY2025 recommended budget was approximately $446 million, with the Capital Improvement Plan accounting for $304 million (68 percent of the total). The vast majority of that capital spending is growth-driven: new road extensions, water infrastructure for new subdivisions, parks for new residential areas, and interchange improvements for increased traffic.
If development slows, much of that capital spending should slow with it. This is the largest single compressible category in the Marana budget.
Some categories do not compress as development slows.
Police staffing scales with population, not permits. Sixty thousand residents need patrol coverage regardless of what gets approved next year.
Debt service is contractual and fixed.
Pension obligations (PSPRS) are driven by prior commitments and growing actuarial pressure, not the current pace of development.
Fire service is provided by Northwest Fire District, a separate political subdivision funded by its own property tax levy, and sits entirely outside the Town’s general fund.
Useful forum question: which specific budget lines would the candidate reduce, by what amounts, and over what timeline?
The Minimum Acceptable Commitment
There is one structural reform that requires no new taxes, no voter approval, and no significant political risk. It can be adopted by council resolution.
Currently, Marana does not require staff or council to publicly disclose the fiscal contribution of a proposed development as part of the approval record. A formal fiscal impact analysis, what a project generates in TPT, impact fees, and ongoing revenue, set against what it costs in infrastructure and services, made public before a vote, would surface the fiscal logic of each approval to the residents most affected by it.
A candidate who supports mandatory fiscal impact disclosure before major approvals is committing to the minimum threshold of accountability that the current structure allows. A candidate who opposes it owes voters an explanation of why the public should not see the fiscal analysis that drives the decision.
What a Complete Answer Looks Like
A complete platform addresses three questions with specific, internally consistent numbers.
What happens to construction TPT and impact fee revenue under the proposed development pace, and how is any gap filled?
What additional revenue tools are being proposed, and with what estimated yields?
Which budget categories are being compressed, by how much, over what timeline?
The Oro Valley Signal
The thesis is not theoretical. Oro Valley operates on the same fiscal model as Marana (no primary property tax, heavy dependence on TPT and growth revenues). Its Chief Financial Officer publicly stated in July 2025 that sales tax revenue has been stagnant at approximately $30 million annually for nearly three years, that virtually all recent revenue growth came from pandemic-era stimulus, and that the town is now actively studying new taxes (use tax, commercial rental tax) to address structural stagnation. The same CFO noted that a property tax would immediately raise Oro Valley’s bond rating to AAA status.
Oro Valley is several years further along the same growth curve. Its current fiscal conversation is the one Marana will have when its developable land inventory matures.
The fiscal cliff in the TPT-dependent model does not arrive suddenly. It arrives gradually, through the accumulation of small annual gaps between a slowing revenue base and a relatively fixed cost structure. The time to address structural dependency is before that decline becomes visible in the budget, not after.
A Note on Tone
The Sonoran Think Tank does not endorse candidates. The purpose of this analysis is to give voters a framework for evaluating fiscal platforms on their actual merits, in the candidate’s own words, against the structural facts any administration must work within.
The pattern that frustrates Marana voters is the result of a documented fiscal structure that makes certain decisions structural. Voters who want different outcomes can ask candidates how they plan to change the structure or manage decisions within it. The questions in this guide are designed to help that happen.
A Pocket Card for the Forum
If you want a short version to keep in your pocket, three questions cover most of the ground.
On approvals. When the next budget shortfall arrives, what specific project type will you decline that a previous council accepted, and what is the fiscal consequence of declining it?
On revenue. Which revenue tool (use tax, commercial rental tax, secondary levy, primary property tax) is on your table, and what is its estimated annual yield?
On transparency. Will you support a council policy requiring a published fiscal impact analysis for every major project before the vote?
A candidate who can answer all three is engaging with the actual structure. A candidate who cannot is asking for trust inside the same structure that produced the pattern voters are showing up to ask about.
All figures cited in this guide are drawn from Marana’s audited FY2024 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report, Marana budget adoption documents, the Oro Valley CFO’s July 2025 public budget presentation, Northwest Fire District public governance records, Arizona Department of Revenue TPT rate schedules, and League of Arizona Cities and Towns shared revenue data. All source documents are public records.
The full paper is available here:
“Why Marana Keeps Approving Car Washes: The Fiscal Mechanics Behind the Development Pattern,”
The Sonoran Think Tank is a Southern Arizona civic research organization. All content is free and publicly accessible. STT does not endorse candidates or electoral outcomes.