Housing, elections and hockey are on Supervisor Thomas Galvin’s mind as he steps down as chair

With the start of the new year, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors will have a new chair. And 2026 will begin with the board and County Recorder Justin Heap involved in a lawsuit over the roles each has in elections.

A judge last month allowed the county to start an audit of its election system over Heap’s objection, but other disagreements are still there.

Thomas Galvin has served as chair of the Board of Supervisors for the last year; as he gets ready to pass the gavel, he spoke to The Show about the past 12 months and the future.

He began with the controversy over elections between the supervisors and county recorder — and where that stands at the moment.

Full conversation

THOMAS GALVIN: Well, it depends on the situation, right? So in terms of planning and being proactive about preparing for elections, we're working together. The Board of Supervisors and the county recorder, our election duties are bifurcated. So we canvass the elections, but we also run operations on Election Day. But the Recorder has important election responsibilities, which include sending out mail in ballots and then receiving them.

But at the same time, there is a lawsuit going on that is basically kind of hanging over our heads. But we're working with the recorder on a professional basis.

MARK BRODIE: Do you get the feeling that lawsuit will be resolved by the time you start holding elections in 2026?

GALVIN: Well, I certainly hope so. In fact, the recorder filed for a temporary restraining order against the Board of Supervisors a few weeks ago. And as I said then and I say it repeatedly, the Board of Supervisors, we don't start fights, but we finish them. And so I was confident we would win that. And we did win that.

I also feel really good about our stance and our arguments in the current lawsuit that is pending. However, we have very important elections coming up. We have jurisdictional elections in the springtime; and then obviously we have the primary election in the summer; and then we have the general election in the fall, which features statewide races.

The Board of Supervisors is taking all of that in a very responsible and prudent fashion, and we're going to make sure that we're completely prepared for those elections.

BRODIE: Let me ask you about another issue that I know you've been working on over the past year, and that is the issue of housing and affordable housing. We've gotten a lot of news releases from the county supervisors about new apartment complexes, new housing units opening up over the past year.

I'm curious how much of a dent you think specifically the county can put into this region's housing shortage?

GALVIN: I think we can put a significant dent in terms of making progress. All of us on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors really care about this issue, about housing affordability. As Maricopa County keeps growing, I have seen constituents and I have talked especially with young families, people who just have kids. It's hard for them to find a house to buy, much less a house of their dreams.

The other thing is that we sense a real frustration at the state level that the governor and the Legislature really haven't addressed this issue head on. They've been nibbling at the edges. But Maricopa County, we're the fourth-largest county in the country, and the five of us serve in an executive role.

And so what we have done in an executive fashion is take charge and lead on this issue. No one told us to do this. And what we have done is work on issues that people believe are really important in housing affordability. And making sure that there's enough supply in the market to help this market grow is important.

BRODIE: Do you think this ideally would be an area that maybe you and your colleagues on the board would not have to deal with? You mentioned the governor and Legislature haven't really done a ton in this area. Would you prefer that this all come from the state or maybe even the cities?

GALVIN: I do, because this is a statewide issue. But at the same time, Maricopa County, we can't just sit back and watch others. What we have done is take the lead on a wide variety of issues, not just housing affordability, but in terms of budgeting, we have a balanced budget. In terms of elections, as you've just seen, we have done a lot in terms of election integrity, but other major issues, including water, transportation and now, of course, housing.

BRODIE: Let me ask you about another sort of land use issue that you just dealt with fairly recently in terms of zoning, specifically related to data centers. And this has been such a big issue, not just here in the Valley and around the state, but around the country as well.

What did you hear from your constituents about what they are OK with and maybe what they are not OK with as it relates to those particular facilities?

GALVIN: For data centers, you have to look at it from what's reasonable and what's appropriate for the land use designation. There was a lot of chatter about a project that got denied out in the East Valley last week.

But in Maricopa County, we do a very serious job of taking a look at where these data centers should be placed. It doesn't mean that they're all great. It doesn't mean they're all bad. You have to take them on a case by case basis.

But President [Donald] Trump and Democrats in Congress have all agreed that this is a national security issue in terms of planning ahead for the economy of the future. How are we going to address AI? How are we going to address energy needs? How are we going to address the threats from China and the challenge from China militarily and economically?

Right, and so at Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, we balance all of those interests and we approve projects where we believe they should be placed in a reasonable fashion.

BRODIE: I wonder if you and your colleagues on the board are maybe in a unique position because the rules apply to unincorporated land, county land, which not always, but oftentimes are sort of not in huge population centers. Does that maybe give you more of an interesting place to be looking at facilities like data centers that a lot of residents have said they don't necessarily want to live that close to?

GALVIN: Kind of, but not really, because you still have to answer a lot of questions that you would answer in any incorporated city. What are the infrastructure issues at play here? What about water? What about energy needs? You have to talk to the utilities. So at the county board, it's not like we have it easy because we're designated unincorporated areas. We still have to take a hard look at these things.

Also, jobs. This is about jobs. You can't just stick out a building out in the middle of nowhere because you want people to drive to those jobs or to have transportation to those jobs.

So I believe that we're still wrestling with all the same questions as cities do as well. I think we just do a really good job of heading off projects that are really not good for the proposed location. And we do a really good job of placing them where they should be.

BRODIE: Before I let you go, I want to ask you about an issue that I know is near and dear to your heart. You started earlier this year, a committee to try to bring an NHL team back to the Valley.

Where are you in that effort? And how optimistic would you say that you are that the Valley will have another hockey team here?

GALVIN: Well, I'm going to take the second question first. I'm very optimistic that eventually we'll have an NHL team return back to the Valley, but it's in terms of finding an owner and finding the appropriate location.

This fall, I named Andrea Doan — who's known as the wife of Shane Doan and the mother of Josh Doan, but she's a well-known name within hockey circles herself — as the chair of this public advisory committee. This is a citizens-led committee to bring pro hockey back to the Valley.

We're working hard at this. This is a yearslong process. And what I have said repeatedly is unlike previous ownership groups, with the Coyotes, we're not going to do it the wrong way, we're going to do it the right way, which means we're not going to overpromise, and we're not going to under-deliver.

BRODIE: It seems like in the past and you and I've talked about this, the ownership group and the arena, the building, are sort of the two big stumbling blocks. Have you made any appreciable progress on either of those?

GALVIN: Absolutely on both. Obviously when this news came out in January that I was forming this committee, I heard from a lot of folks. And my job in the committee's task is to separate the pretenders from the contenders.

Another thing is to look at locations and make sure what is viable. In the private sector I work as a land use attorney, so I understand these issues intimately. And what we saw in previous iterations was that previous Coyote ownership groups did a really bad job of finding location or selling the in the court of public opinion on why these locations would be good or not.

We've got to do this from the ground-up approach. We're also working with local youth advocacy groups. We're working with Lyndsey Fry, who's an Olympian from the East Valley. And we're going to work together as a team, quote unquote, to make sure as a community we're going to bring this team back the right way.

BRODIE: What have you heard so far from the NHL about their interest in expanding back to Arizona?

GALVIN: It's no secret that the NHL has always been interested and happy with the Valley, but they understood that the previous ownership groups just did not do a good job of finding location, a permanent location for the team.

I have had meetings with the NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, and I have told them that I've seen this as a reputational issue for the Valley because we should not be losing teams, we should be gaining teams.

And also I see this as an economic development issue. When the Coyotes left, a lot of businesses were impacted on a secondary and tertiary level. And so he understands my commitment to bringing a hockey team, not just for the hockey and the sports aspect, but for the business and the economic development aspect. And he's fully supportive of that.

But it's on us as a community to show the NHL not that we're entitled to a team, but that we're going to earn a team.