The Show for July 22, 2026: AZ primary update, how cities handle data centers and more

General election races are coming into focus, as Arizona’s primary votes are being counted. What some of those contests might look like. Plus, our series on data centers continues with a look at the differing approaches of two Valley cities.

Transcript

ANNOUNCER: KJZZ’s original production, The Show, is supported by Banner Health, Arizona’s largest nonprofit healthcare system. Last year, Banner reinvested more than $1.1 billion in community health and charity care. Banner Health: Nonprofit for Arizona. Bannerhealth.com/nonprofitforaz.

MARK BRODIE: Hi, I’m Mark Brodie, co-host of The Show, an original production from KJZZ. Every weekday, we bring you the latest news and culture from across the state. You can find much more at theshow.kjzz.org. Here’s today’s episode.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning, it’s The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I’m Mark Brodie. Coming up, there are more sites where there’s been public exposure to measles in Maricopa County, we’ll get the latest on that. And our series on data centers continues with a tale of two Valley cities.

But first, election officials continue to count votes from Arizona’s primary election, but a number of races have already been called and contests set for November’s general election.

Republican Andy Biggs won his primary convincingly against fellow Congressman David Schweikert in the race to take on Katie Hobbs for governor. State Lawmaker Alexander Kolodin won his race for the GOP nomination for Secretary of State, and Senate President Warren Petersen will be the Republican nominee for Attorney General.

There were competitive primary races up and down the ballot, and some of those are still too close to call. With me now to break down the results is KJZZ’s Wayne Schutsky from the politics desk.

Wayne, good morning. I’m very impressed that your eyes are still open right now.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, a little tired, but happy to be here.

MARK BRODIE: Well-caffeinated, I hope.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, too much.

MARK BRODIE: Too much? All right. So before we get into the results, there had been so much talk about how this election would go because, especially in Maricopa County, because there’d been so much discord between the supervisors and the recorder over who was doing what and who had what responsibility. In the end, how’d it go?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: It seems like it went pretty seamlessly. Make elections boring again, as Chairwoman Kate Brophy McGee said. I was out at PVCC polling place and it wasn’t super crowded there, but people were just kind of trickling in and seemingly everything was going smoothly. Saw a few little things online about alleged issues at one polling center in Scottsdale, but it seems like that was much ado about nothing, more the online folks looking for engagement.

MARK BRODIE: Interesting. All right, so let’s get to the numbers and let me start with governor. The polls had suggested that Andy Biggs would win pretty easily against David Schweikert. I’m not sure the polls thought that he would win by this much.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: That’s right. The overall result not surprising. Andy Biggs, this was his race to lose for months and months and months. But yes, 73% is a pretty convincing victory. Though in retrospect, also not surprising. We saw Congressman Schweikert’s campaign really just stop campaigning over the past month. We didn’t really hear from them, we’d send a request for comment on different things, and their fundraising was an issue. And so it’s, I guess, not entirely surprising that their campaign kind of fizzled out towards the end.

MARK BRODIE: And we’ve already started seeing some ads from the Hobbs campaign looking ahead to the general election. What did Biggs have to say about, is he looking to maybe the proverbial pivot in the general election or is he just going to sort of stay as the Trump-endorsed Turning Point candidate?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, I mean, he’s so closely tied to the president that I don’t know how much of a pivot he could actually make. We saw a bit of this even before the primary, as we results because, as you said, everyone knew he was kind of going to win this. So he has been trying to pitch himself as more of a, he’s still saying he’s a principled conservative, but "I’m willing to work across the aisle." He pointed to some times in his background working with folks, with Democrats from Arizona on different legislation. But he’s also said, "I’m not going to shy away. This is who I am. I’m principled, as I said." So a bit of a pivot, but there’s no way he can unattach himself completely from the president.

MARK BRODIE: All right. Before we move on from the governor’s race, I think it’s worth noting there was one more primary in the race for governor on the No Labels Party. Hugh Lytle, who had gotten a lot of attention as an independent candidate, did not win this primary.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, it’s looking like he’s going to lose it to, I believe her name is Teri Hourihan, who is — the No Labels powers that be tried to get her to drop out of that race. Lytle was the hand-picked guy for this party to be kind of that independent check on what was expected to be Biggs and Hobbs. And he put a lot, business owner, he put a lot of his own money into this campaign. It was kind of a foregone conclusion that he was going to be there and there were questions like, who’s he going to pull more votes away from in the general election? And then this all fizzled out.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah, so he is currently losing by a little more than a thousand votes. Obviously, still some votes out there to count. No idea how many No Labels ballots are still out there.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, and that doesn’t sound like a lot, but again, this is a very small new party. So a thousand votes in this race is not analogous to a thousand votes in a race like one of the major parties.

MARK BRODIE: Right, OK. So let’s move on to Secretary of State. This was a contest between Alexander Kolodin, a state representative, Gina Swoboda, who is a former state party chair. And Kolodin won almost 60 to 40%. Is this a surprise, this result?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, another not particularly close race. In one sense, it’s not surprising in that he was kind of the MAGA, the Turning Point endorsed candidate. They do very well in primaries historically in Arizona. So until someone shows me that they can defeat that, then I don’t know what’s going to happen there.

Swoboda just, again, it was hard finding a lane. She pitched herself as kind of the more electable candidate in general elections, but that’s what David Schweikert did too. And for years now, we’ve seen Republican primary voters not choose that candidate. She had previously been endorsed by the president to run the state party, but she did not bring that endorsement with her into the Secretary of State’s race. And so that pitch of "I’m going to be a nonpartisan Secretary of State" was not particularly interesting to a lot of Republican primary voters who are very much buying what the president is selling about these elections are being corrupted by Democrats and things like that.

MARK BRODIE: Safe to say that election security and sort of elections in general will be a key issue in this race between Kolodin and Adrian Fontes?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yep, just like Gov. Hobbs, I think we’ve already seen Fontes introduce a commercial today where he is basically highlighting all of Kolodin’s positions. He’s very much an election denier, aligned with the president on these unfounded claims that the 2020 election was stolen. He filed a lot of those lawsuits challenging the results of that election. So Fontes is very much, much like Gov. Hobbs used her experience as Secretary of State during 2020 to win the governor’s race in 2022, I think Fontes is going to use his experience as an election administrator to say, "You do not want this guy running your elections."

MARK BRODIE: OK, so there was also a contested GOP primary in the race for Attorney General. This one was a little bit closer between Warren Petersen and Rodney Glassman. Petersen won this one 56 to basically 44%. Not sure if this was a surprise or not. Was the margin at all surprising?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, this was a really interesting race because, again, if we’re going to go on name ID, Petersen probably had better name ID as the State Senate President. But state lawmakers still don’t have a great ID statewide. So it was kind of interesting to see whether that was going to help him out here.

There was no actual Trump endorsement in this race. Petersen got a shout-out at a Trump event, but then the president reposted an endorsement of Glassman from someone else, as he’s wont to do lately.

MARK BRODIE: Which he also did with Swoboda, right?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Exactly. So it was kind of, neither had these big groups backing them. Turning Point didn’t weigh in on this race. So I think I would have given the edge to Petersen given his a little bit higher profile. He’s been able to use his position as the Senate President to kind of hit back on Attorney General Mayes, who now he will face. But wasn’t kind of, I thought this one might be a little bit closer, if only because Petersen was running like it was closer. This was a really ugly race where they were really going at each other pretty hard.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah. And would you imagine that some of the messages that Glassman had against Petersen will now be picked up by the Mayes campaign?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Oh, definitely. His biggest attack was that Petersen isn’t qualified to be the Attorney General because he has not been a lawyer for all that long, does not have traditional experience in the courtroom, all of that kind of thing. And yeah, they basically just gift-wrapped an opening argument, as it were, for Attorney General Mayes’s campaign.

MARK BRODIE: Interesting. OK, let’s move down the ballot a little bit to the Superintendent of Public Instruction race. In this case, the incumbent Tom Horne is, I’m not sure if this race has been called yet or not, but he is losing to Kimberly Yee, the State Treasurer, who’s term-limited from that race. She was brought in by JD Kaufman, some of the Arizona Freedom Caucus folks, to run against Tom Horne. And right now she’s winning 53 to 47%.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, not called yet. There’s about, I think, 15% of the votes left to count. And so that margin is still within, he could pick it up, but it’s trending her direction. This is another one where we’ve got, he’s the incumbent, but you really have two incumbents. As you mentioned, she’s the State Treasurer, she’s a former State Senator. So she’s really well known in Republican circles here. So the name ID was kind of a wash. They’re both long-time Arizona politicians.

So this one really came down to, I think, a personality preference. This race was really about the school voucher program, that might have played into it. She was backed by the Freedom Caucus. Not a traditional Freedom Caucus candidate, but again, having that backing may have just given her that boost. Because as we’re seeing in this race, 6% is nothing to sniff at, but it’s much closer than the margin in a lot of these other races.

MARK BRODIE: Right. On the Democratic side, there was also a contested primary, this one not particularly close. Teresa Leyba Ruiz beat Brett Newby basically 80 to 20%, so she will be the Democratic nominee. Sometimes these races, Wayne, can be like for superintendent can be a little tough because they’re down the ballot. There’s not enough oxygen necessarily for them. Do you get the sense that that might be the case in this year’s election as well?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: It’s possible, but again, also, this is a race where Democrats tend to do better statewide, even historically before they were winning other statewide offices as frequently as they are these days, because Democratic Party is often seen as more pro-public education and that kind of thing. So it’ll be interesting to see how the school voucher part plays into this because that office obviously administers that program as well. But Teresa Leyba Ruiz, she strikes the profile of someone qualified for this office. She’s a former community college president, that kind of thing. So not surprising to see her kind of run away with the primary. It’ll just kind of be up to the voters of Arizona to see what qualifications they want leading that office.

MARK BRODIE: All right. That is Wayne Schutsky from KJZZ’s politics desk. He’s going to stick around. We’re going to talk a little bit more about some of the other contested primaries in just a moment. This is The Show.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning, it’s The Show on KJZZ 91.5, I’m Mark Brodie. Coming up, the complicated relationship between data centers, city governments, and residents.

KEVIN HARTKE: We don’t need them as part of our economy, but if we believe that they can jump-start other industries or other possibilities of companies and jobs, we would be interested in looking at that.

MARK BRODIE: We continue our series on data centers called Centers of Attention.

But first, let’s return now to the results of Arizona’s primary elections. KJZZ’s Wayne Schutsky from the politics desk is still with me in studio to do that.

Wayne, let’s move to some of the federal races, and one of the most closely watched primaries on both the Republican and Democratic sides was in Arizona’s 1st Congressional District. This is sort of a Scottsdale, Fountain Hills district that David Schweikert has represented for a long time. Let’s start on the Republican side. Maybe not such a surprise, but Jay Feely, former NFL player and commentator, he has won this primary, almost getting 50% of the vote in a three-person race.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, which is pretty impressive. A lot of times when you start getting more and more candidates in the race, someone’s going to win it with 28, 30%. But yeah, he had the combo of name ID, as you mentioned, he’s a former NFL player, has been on television doing broadcasts, plus the Trump endorsement. Trump actually endorsed him after convincing him to get out of CD-5, where he actually lives, which is a safer Republican district.

MARK BRODIE: In the Southeast Valley.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, which is a safer Republican district. So he hopped over and got that endorsement, and yeah, he kind of ran away with it. We weren’t really sure how close this one might be because Joseph Chaplik is a state lawmaker, a former state lawmaker who represented a good portion of that district. So he had decent name ID among the hardcore Republicans as well. But yeah, he didn’t end up coming close.

MARK BRODIE: OK, and on the Democratic side, it was two candidates who ran among many others, both last time and this time. But Amish Shah is winning right now. This race, I think, has not been called. He’s up about 40% to about 34%, but he’s leading by about 4,500 votes. This was, he was not the choice of national Democrats to win this race.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: No, he won that primary last time around and lost to David Schweikert, as you mentioned, by about 3%. But he went for it again, and Marlene Galán-Woods, who is a former broadcaster, former Republican who became a Democrat during the first Trump era, she ran again against him and kind of was pitching herself as, "Well, he had his shot. I’m the more electable candidate. We need someone who can beat Trump’s endorsed candidate and stand up to the president."

And I actually heard from voters at the polls when I went out there who voted for her, who kind of echoed that message. But what Shah told me is, "I knock doors." And he kind of laughed as he said it. He’s like, "I tell people this over and over again and people dismiss me, but..." And he does. He’s just a great campaigner when it comes to actually getting into the community and talking to the voters, and he does it on a prolific level. And again, just like last time, he talked to enough voters to convince them that he’s the right guy for the job.

MARK BRODIE: Did he give you the sense that he learned anything from last time? Does he plan to change anything in terms of the general election from last time to this time?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: I don’t think so. I think he’s still going to lean into that really just connecting with voters on an individual basis as much as possible. He told me that building that relationship he thinks is what propelled him to victory again.

I didn’t talk to him about this, but I think he might be leaning into the fact that last time around it was kind of a red wave year. Donald Trump was on the ballot and won Arizona. He won that district after losing it in 2020. So that is a closely divided district that leans Republican, but you have a lot of Republican voters who kind of will vote for a Democrat on occasion if they really don’t like who’s on the ballot on the Republican side. So I think maybe he’s leaning into the expected blue wave year to kind of flip that 3% that he lost last time.

MARK BRODIE: Well, on the flip side, Jay Feely, you referenced, had the endorsement of President Trump. Did he talk at all last night about how he plans to use that in a race, in a district that’s not a super MAGA district?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, so talking with reporters, we asked him, "Do you think that you have to moderate yourself, maybe back away from Trump a little bit in this district, as he is never been less popular nationwide? I’m talking about economy issues, tariffs, all that stuff," which are really important in this district. It’s a mostly affluent district, people really care about those issues.

And basically what Feely said is, similar to what Biggs said, actually, is that "I’m not going to change who I am." He said he thinks voters value authenticity more than anything else, but that he also doesn’t believe in this "other side is evil" rhetoric that often happens. So he’s, again, pitching himself as someone who’s willing to listen to Democrats and work with them when he thinks it’s in the best interest of the district.

MARK BRODIE: OK, one other quick race I want to ask you about in the congressional races, this is in District 5, you referenced Andy Biggs’s old district. Mark Lamb, former Pinal County Sheriff, won pretty handily over Daniel Keenan, despite some scandals that had come out recently. He denied them, but still, that was some pretty bad publicity for him in the days leading up to voting.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, and I’ve talked about this on the show before. Yeah, it was all that Arizona Republic reporting about lurid text message relationships, we’ll call them. And extramarital type of stuff, stuff that doesn’t seem to match his family values type of campaign in a district that is very religious, very oriented on that kind of thing. Ultimately, yeah, he still ended up winning by what, like 20% or something in that range.

MARK BRODIE: Pretty close to it, yeah.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, so not entirely surprising, again, for a number of reasons. I keep going back to it, but name ID plus Trump endorsement, especially in a safe Republican district, is just a golden ticket. He was the Pinal County Sheriff, he was on YouTube, he had television shows, everyone knew who he was.

So I think there’s a good chunk of that electorate who probably just has been conditioned by the president and other Republican leaders to think anything they read in the media that is negative is a lie, and they bought Lamb’s argument. He was not showing up in public, but he was going to these local Republican meetings and telling everyone it was a smear campaign. And I think those local hardcore voters who show up in a primary mostly believe that.

I will say it is interesting that Keenan, who is relatively unknown, did get 40%. Like, that’s not nothing, but obviously nowhere near enough to win that race.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah, OK. So about a minute or so left, Wayne. Obviously, there were some legislative primaries as well. Anything notable coming out of those?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: One interesting thing is on the Democratic side, we did see some progressive groups and lawmakers like Senator Analise Ortiz actually put up primary challengers to their own fellow lawmakers. And in one case, we saw Representative Lydia Hernandez looks like she lost her seat. She’s historically been kind of more of a conservative Democrat. Also, there’s a lot of personality conflicts in that district, has to do with some of her behavior on a school board that she serves on and things like that. And yeah, she pretty handily, I think she’s down by like 20% in that race.

But another one of those challengers was to Alma Hernandez, who’s a state representative down in Tucson going for the Senate, and she seems to be hanging on to that seat.

MARK BRODIE: OK, interesting to see. That is KJZZ’s Wayne Schutsky staying awake to talk about all the results. Go get some sleep. Thanks for doing this.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Thank you for having me.

MARK BRODIE: The Maricopa County Department of Public Health has identified six new sites with public exposure to measles. There have been 25 confirmed cases so far this year in the county, which is significantly higher than the annual average.

With me now to talk about this is Ariella Dale, Chief Science Officer with the Maricopa County Department of Public Health. Ariella, good morning. Thanks for being here.

ARIELLA DALE: Good morning. Thank you for having me.

MARK BRODIE: So where are these sites?

ARIELLA DALE: So these sites are located throughout Maricopa County. We really encourage folks to visit our website, maricopa.gov/measles, because we are adding sites as we become aware of them. So these are located in different parts of the county.

MARK BRODIE: Is it concerning at all that it’s not clustered in one area, that it really is kind of countywide?

ARIELLA DALE: It is concerning for us. As we’ve seen, the trends in Maricopa County are mirroring those in the United States. We’re seeing more and more measles cases. So we really want to encourage folks to remember that the best way to protect themselves is to get the measles vaccination for themselves and for others.

MARK BRODIE: And so let’s say somebody gets the vaccine today. How long does it take until you have that immunity?

ARIELLA DALE: So for measles vaccinations, it takes time for each individual person, for their immune system to come up to speed. So we do say within a few weeks folks should enjoy that full protection and be protected from measles.

MARK BRODIE: OK. And in terms of the numbers, are you expecting there to be more? I mentioned there have been 25 confirmed cases so far. Are you expecting that number to grow?

ARIELLA DALE: You know, that’s hard to predict at this time, but we certainly are continuing to monitor and have our enhanced surveillance efforts for measles cases. We encourage folks who have been at those sites to have a low threshold for seeking healthcare if they have any of the signs and symptoms for measles, such as fever, rash, cough.

MARK BRODIE: If they do, they should go get tested for it and not think, “Oh, I just have a cold or something.”

ARIELLA DALE: Right, we would want them to go ahead and work with their healthcare provider and get tested if they’ve been at one of these sites.

MARK BRODIE: OK. And how are you discovering these sites? Like what’s that process like in terms of saying, “OK, there’s been somebody who was at this particular place”?

ARIELLA DALE: Yeah, so as part of our routine public health activities, we conduct case investigations, and so we will work with the person who has measles to understand where they have been in the community. And then once we are aware of where they’ve been in the community, when there’s a risk of exposure for the public where we’re unable to identify who all could have been there, then we will post on our website and do these press releases so that everyone is aware of their risk and can protect themselves if needed.

MARK BRODIE: Have you found that there are people who have been at some of these places who feel like they might be exposed who are proactively going to get tested? Like is there evidence to suggest people are doing that?

ARIELLA DALE: At this time, we want to just encourage folks to continue reporting in and to working with their healthcare providers. Those exposures have occurred very recently, so we will continue to monitor for several weeks for any potential cases that come as a result of this.

MARK BRODIE: Are you anticipating that this is going to continue for a little while now?

ARIELLA DALE: We do anticipate, just like we’re seeing nationally, there’s more and more cases of measles. And so we are prepared as public health to respond to those new cases.

MARK BRODIE: We heard, for example, in Mohave County, public health officials there were saying, “Well, we think this is pretty well contained. We think this is pretty well over.” It sounds like that’s not the case in Maricopa County for sure right now, and maybe won’t be for a while into the future?

ARIELLA DALE: That’s true. I think when we think about measles and measles vaccination, we’re looking for a 95% threshold of vaccination, and we do know that we are under that as a county. So we expect that there will still be cases that will occur in the coming months either related to these clusters or even new cases.

MARK BRODIE: Are there any traits that the folks who have been confirmed to have measles share, like by age or any other kind of demographic data?

ARIELLA DALE: For these cases, our highest risk groups are thinking about those who are unvaccinated. And so when we think about unvaccinated individuals, we think about, you know, those are different people throughout our community. So there’s not necessarily risk factors otherwise that these folks are sharing.

MARK BRODIE: OK. And how much of this is due to people who are not vaccinated?

ARIELLA DALE: That continues to be the leading contributor to measles infections here in the county. We have folks who are not vaccinated.

MARK BRODIE: So it’s mostly a fact that like, would you say most if not all of the people who have contracted measles have not been vaccinated?

ARIELLA DALE: Most if not all. You know, nationally, we’re seeing that 97% of cases that have been reported to the CDC were unvaccinated.

MARK BRODIE: And would it be your expectation that that statistic would continue, that to the extent that there are further cases here in Maricopa County going forward, that those would also be among folks who have not gotten vaccinated?

ARIELLA DALE: Yes, we would expect for that trend to continue. The vaccination is very effective, it’s safe, and so we think that this will continue to protect people for those who are vaccinated, that the unvaccinated individuals will be at the highest risk.

MARK BRODIE: OK. That is Ariella Dale, Chief Science Officer with the Maricopa County Department of Public Health. Ariella, thanks so much for your time and your insights, I appreciate it.

ARIELLA DALE: Thank you so much.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning, it’s The Show on KJZZ 91.5, I’m Mark Brodie.

Phoenix is one of the biggest markets for data centers in the country, but that’s led to big controversies about where the facilities should be located and if they should even be here at all.

This week on The Show, we’re asking questions about data centers in a series called "Centers of Attention." Yesterday, we toured one to find out what they do and how they work. Today, it’s a tale of two Valley cities and their differing approaches to this kind of development.

RENÉ GUILLEN: For every city that maybe is rethinking their approach to data centers, I also have cities and towns that are also clamoring for data centers.

MARK BRODIE: That’s René Guillen, Executive Director of the League of Arizona Cities and Towns earlier this year. Some cities and towns are clamoring for data centers, others have approved new ordinances restricting where they can locate. And there have been some high profile cases, think Tucson and Chandler, in which communities have recently said “No thanks” to new data center development altogether.

CHANDLER CITY COUNCIL: Motion carries unanimously. All right! Power to the people! Power...

MARK BRODIE: That was the response to a vote by the Chandler City Council late last year, rejecting a new data center in the southern part of the city. Former U.S. Senator Kyrsten Sinema had lobbied for it on behalf of the industry, the vote to deny it was cheered by folks like Bernie Sanders.

Chandler has six data center campuses housing 11 data center buildings. And on a sunny afternoon earlier this year, the city’s economic development director, Micah Miranda, drove me to what would have been the newest.

MICAH MIRANDA: There, people turn in here. This site was formally occupied by Northrop Grumman. We retained them here in the community, they built a new manufacturing facility just up the road in the Price Corridor, and this was the site of the most recent zoning case.

MARK BRODIE: The building has been vacant for almost a decade and sits on about 10 acres. Miranda says he’d like to see it become something in line with what the city’s voters have said they want: developments like advanced manufacturing, pharmaceutical, and R&D.

Miranda says data centers aren’t good or bad, it’s relative to where they are, especially what’s located around them. And that, he says, is part of Chandler’s challenge. The city is pretty well built out. That means when land opens up, Chandler has to be choosy about what to put there and what it gets out of that development.

MICAH MIRANDA: We’re still a growing community, people continue to move to Chandler. We want to make sure we have a healthy jobs-to-housing ratio, so we just don’t want to be a bedroom community. We want to make sure we’re going to have employment opportunities for residents and regional residents for years into the future.

MARK BRODIE: Is that one of the concerns about data centers, that they’re very large, but they do not create a whole lot of jobs?

MICAH MIRANDA: That’s one of the main challenges that a lot of more developed cities see.

MARK BRODIE: And Miranda says it’s not just the jobs a data center can create, it’s about the fact that other companies don’t necessarily want or need to be near a data center.

MICAH MIRANDA: I’ve never had a company tell me, "Hey, because we’re in this proximity to a data center, we’re going to come."

KEVIN HARTKE: We don’t need them as part of our economy, but if we believe that they can jump-start other industries or other possibilities of companies and jobs, we would be interested in looking at that.

MARK BRODIE: That’s Chandler Mayor Kevin Hartke. He served in city government for more than 15 years and was one of the "no" votes on that most recent data center project. The jobs issue is a big one for cities, but it’s relative. A small number of jobs for one city might be considered a windfall in another. Yet even data center operators acknowledge the facilities don’t need a lot of workers.

Jason Pfaff with Iron Mountain says his data centers typically employ two people per shift, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

JASON PFAFF: You have critical infrastructure technicians, which those are your electrical and mechanical specialists. You have service delivery, which would be kind of that service focus, like whatever our customers need, because we do provide service for them for a fee. We’ll go reboot a server, we’ll go change out something. And then we have security as well.

MARK BRODIE: But even though data centers don’t create a lot of jobs, some Valley cities are still looking to bring them in.

ERIC ORSBORN: There are places where I 100% agree that does not make sense to put a data center in that specific property with that set of circumstances in that community. But we really think that when we make our case and help the public to understand the benefits and how we’re dealing with some of the issues that come with data centers, that this is the right location for data center development to happen.

MARK BRODIE: Across the Valley from Chandler, Buckeye is trying to attract data centers to a specific part of town. Mayor Eric Orsborn says he understands why some cities might be feeling all done with data centers, but in Buckeye’s case, he says there’s plenty of land for both data centers and other developments.

ERIC ORSBORN: We have so much property and we have areas that these specific uses fit and they are away from the residential. And we still have just miles and miles of property that still work for the logistics and the advanced manufacturing.

MARK BRODIE: That’s more than 639 square miles, making Buckeye Arizona’s biggest city by land area and one of the fastest-growing cities in the country. Buckeye still has areas where you can get that rural feel and find a tractor dealership, but it also has one of the best-known high-end master-planned communities, Verrado.

The land Orsborn envisions for data centers is south of I-10, just west of the city’s airport. Right now, it’s mostly open desert and farmland, and Orsborn says, importantly, it’s away from homes.

A data center land acquisition and development company called Tract bought the more than 2,000 acres in 2024. In a press release from the time, Tract predicted the parcel would become one of the biggest data center spaces in the country, with as much as 20 million square feet in as many as 40 individual centers.

The company did not respond to multiple requests for comment, so we don’t know how that development is going, but Buckeye Mayor Orsborn says it makes sense to put data centers in that part of town.

ERIC ORSBORN: I think every location that I’ve heard contemplated, and specifically the one that’s out west of our airport, is away from any large master-planned community and is actually a really good location. It is a very complementary use to our airport.

MARK BRODIE: Is it in some ways helpful to you that other Valley cities don’t necessarily want data centers or more data centers?

ERIC ORSBORN: Well, I tell all of them, "Hey, when you’re telling them you don’t want them, tell them to come to Buckeye. We would really appreciate that."

MARK BRODIE: While Orsborn and the leaders of other cities looking to attract data centers believe there is an economic value to having them there, residents often don’t see it that way. Projects have faced opposition in cities and towns across the state and country due to concerns about power and water use, noise, and other criticisms. Chandler Mayor Kevin Hartke says he’s surprised how big of an issue data centers have become to the general public.

KEVIN HARTKE: I think a lot of it is, is again, it’s the big building, it’s the uncertain future. It is even the imagined future for some, what could this lead to? And so, again, there’s a lot of story out there.

MARK BRODIE: So that means mayors looking to add data centers, like Buckeye’s Eric Orsborn, have to tell that story and address their residents’ concerns.

ERIC ORSBORN: Some of it is just going through the process of answering the questions and making sure people understand the realities of this, and then also the benefits of it, too: the buildout to the infrastructure, the revenues, the jobs that come with it. All that, it’s very important to get out to the public so that we’re all understanding the same facts that come along with development like this.

MARK BRODIE: But that can still be tough, and Chandler’s Economic Development Director Micah Miranda says it’s an industry-wide challenge that’s not going away.

MICAH MIRANDA: That’s a challenge I think that the data center industry is going to have to overcome, is how do you make this technology, this very important part of 21st century digestible and then acceptable?

MARK BRODIE: And Buckeye Mayor Eric Orsborn says that’s not just a Valley thing or unique to Arizona. He was at a gathering of the U.S. Conference of Mayors earlier this year when this very issue came up.

ERIC ORSBORN: It was funny to listen, we were in a room full of mayors, all sitting around, all of us have microphones, and they go around the room and are taking questions or comments, and every single mayor in that room starts by saying, "Hey, I’m so-and-so, I’m from Ohio and we’re on the front lines of data centers development." And then you have somebody from Arkansas saying, "Well, I’m at this location in Arkansas, we’re on the front lines of data center development." And it was funny to hear from everybody in the room about everybody being on the front lines.

MARK BRODIE: What those front lines will look like in the future is an open question. Despite the Chandler City Council voting down that new project, both the city’s mayor and economic development director say they’re not against data centers and are open to potentially developing new ones down the road. Meanwhile, cities like Buckeye and others are looking to bring in new projects of their own as demand for data only continues to rise.

Tomorrow, the economics of data centers and why there are so many of them in the Valley as our series Centers of Attention continues.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning, it’s The Show on KJZZ 91.5, I’m Mark Brodie.

You might not realize it, but Latinos make up the second largest demographic group in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In fact, the Mormon temple in Mesa was the first ever to offer religious rites in Spanish. And in ASU Professor Sujey Vega’s book, “Mormon Barrio,” she tracks the history of it back more than a century.

Vega herself is not LDS. In fact, she was raised Catholic, though she’s no longer practicing. But as she told my co-host Lauren Gilger earlier this year, her research with Latino LDS communities kept reminding her of her own Catholic grandmother.

SUJEY VEGA: I kept seeing, because I was interviewing a lot of older women for the initial part of it, which was the history of Mesa, Mesa’s LDS Latino population. And I was sitting across these women as they were telling their histories. And I was just at some point looking at their hands. And they reminded me of my grandmother’s hands when she was praying the rosary.

Now, rosaries aren’t used in LDS faith, but I just, I don’t know. I felt like I was sitting across from my grandmother. And she had passed away. And so there was this connection to her faith.

And I remember going to mass with her in Mexico, and just the good memories, the memories of community that I always connected with — that sense of commitment to a faith, to a higher power.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So you’re approaching this research in this book as obviously an academic, but also as someone with this kind of deep religious background and roots. I want to ask about some of the history here, because I think people will be surprised to learn that the second largest population within the LDS Church are Latinos. How far back does this go?

SUJEY VEGA: Let’s see. In Arizona itself, the first Latino or Spanish-speaking ward in Arizona was in 1918. So well over 100 years ago. I want to say the first Mexican convert was in the 1880s. And it was in Sonora. So it’s just south of where we are today.

LAUREN GILGER: But you talk about the fact that even though this history goes back a long time, and even though lots of the people who are Latino and LDS are not like new converts because of that, they still tend to talk about a sense of otherness or separate from the predominantly white leadership of the church, right?

SUJEY VEGA: Yeah, and I think that that’s one thing that I do question. And I try to thread that needle between respecting the community, respecting those people that spoke to me — both members and ex-members — whilst also finding moments of important critique here and there.

So that the leadership of the church is still very much a white male leadership. You have some international men that have been accepted into it. But what I make reference to in the book is it’s not just based on race in terms of the exclusion from leadership, but also class.

And that to me is a bigger issue because a large population of the LDS community that has been converting — whether they be Latinos or from other nations — are not necessarily business owners or lawyers or medical doctors. But that’s who you tend to have in the leadership.

LAUREN GILGER: Interesting. Class is a difference there as well. But there is a history of sort of almost like a racial caste system within the LDS Church, where for a long time Black or even any darker-skinned people were considered inferior until, what, the 1970s?

SUJEY VEGA: Yeah, so, and that’s an interesting point because you have LDS Latino members joining the church before that change was made where Black men were finally able to get the priesthood, right? But LDS Latinos didn’t really engage with that conversation when they were talking about their history. So it was separate and apart.

However, when you have millennials or the children of converts, they often talked about that and how that was a moment of concern for them in their faith. They would find out these moments and try to navigate what they actually felt and what they actually believed in, very similar to my experience with the Catholic Church. How do you reconcile your faith with the organization of the church or the practices of the church that you don’t agree with?

LAUREN GILGER: Right. So along those lines, you talk about the kind of push-pull factors that have, over 100 years of history, attracted Latinos to this church. Talk about what those are and maybe the similarities, right?

Like I think we would assume most people who are Latino are Catholic. Maybe historically they are, but that’s definitely not the case anymore. There is an incredible diversity of religion within this community.

SUJEY VEGA: Absolutely. And I think that that’s something to keep in mind, that folks converted to the LDS Church both because they were either Catholic, they were non-practicing, and/or Protestant.

Typically the LDS Church will cite the notion of the family and the importance of the family for Latino converts and why LDS faith works for them. What I found to be the case is that yes it does. Obviously having a faith that prioritizes family in the same way that you have culturally forever prioritized a family makes sense to them.

But by and large, the reason for conversion was a journey of oneself, right? The ability to read, the ability to have a conversation with, in this case, missionaries that would come to your home and talk about faith in a way that you may have never had a chance to before in a typical, whether it’s a Protestant church or a Catholic church, right?

You’re just kind of given the liturgy. This idea that they could come to a personal attachment, they can reflect on what they feel and what their faith is, they can have a personal connection to God was something the interviews kept coming back to.

LAUREN GILGER: That’s fascinating. So before I let you go, we have to talk about the title of the book, right? These Mormon barrios, these communities that Latino members have formed. Talk about what they’re like, what the people told you there. How did you see their culture and faith intersect in these communities?

SUJEY VEGA: Well, first and foremost, you mentioned this earlier, that not all Latinos are immigrants. But for immigrant communities that form, they go into specific wards, Spanish-speaking wards — or in Spanish, they’re called barrios.

And when immigrant communities go into these wards where they feel connected, where they don’t have to explain their culture, where their conversations about such a deep topic like faith, they do that in their own language and fully embrace what they’re feeling, that’s a level of support that I don’t necessarily see happening in English dominant churches.

And in part because though you have generations of LDS members who have great-grandfathers who converted to the church. And so they are just like me when I was Catholic, expected to follow the faith.

But for LDS barrios or Latino wards, there is a sense of community. There is a sense of joviality, so like laughter, fun, silliness during events. There is, especially for some of these members who have given up their own biological family because the biological family did not convert. And so they still want that sense of family. And you get that in these wards.

And then the other cool thing about it is the wards have a mix of different Latino ethnicities. So again, you have Peruvians, you have Chileans, you have Mexicans, you have El Salvadorians, you have Guatemalans, right? And so you have an interesting moment of collective identity, but also the acceptance of variety, right? So you get to try pupusas as well as you get to try tamales, or maybe tamales for different regions.

LAUREN GILGER: So very diverse, but connected by this faith. It sounds like fun.

SUJEY VEGA: Yeah, no, I mean, it was. It was a fun time to go sometimes to these events. And I went to I think it was a Father’s Day or Mother’s Day. And it was just the funniest, funniest just to see that people were performing, the moms had a dance, the dads had something that they did as well. There was food, there was children running around. It just felt home.

And I think that that’s where in the book, I really wanted to make sure that was evident, that there is this importance of home in these Latino wards that needs to be not just recognized but also protected. I would not want these wards to close in the future as had been done in the past.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, all right. We’ll leave it there for now. That is Sujey Vega, an ASU associate professor in the School of Social Transformation there, as well as the author of the new book, “Mormon Barrio, Latino Belonging in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Sujey, thank you so much for coming on. Congratulations on the book.

SUJEY VEGA: Thank you. It was a pleasure.

MARK BRODIE: Thanks for listening to The Show’s podcast. The Show is produced by Sativa Peterson, Nick Sanchez, Amber Victoria Singer, Athena Ankrah, and Ayana Hamilton. The Show was created by Jon Hoban. Our executive producer is Amy Silverman. You can find more of The Show and sign up for our newsletter at theshow.kjzz.org. You can also find us on Instagram @kjzztheshow.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created for audience accessibility. Transcripts are created on deadline with the assistance of AI tools and then edited, and may not be in their final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio segment.