Nachbar Urban Strategies

Saving Tucson’s Water Future

When I arrived in Tucson, the city had just voted to shut off its only sustainable water source. The Colorado River water that had been introduced through the Central Arizona Project came out of people’s taps discolored and foul-smelling. Two water directors and a city manager had already lost their jobs. The city was serving a million people on a groundwater aquifer that could only sustain roughly 40,000 — and the public had just voted to keep draining it because they didn’t trust the alternative.

I assembled a team of specialists — a nationally recognized water quality expert, a water law attorney, and a public relations firm — and we diagnosed both the technical failure and the political one. The technical fix involved recharging CAP water through a groundwater basin rather than introducing it directly into an aging distribution system. The political fix required rebuilding public trust from scratch. I took out a full-page newspaper ad apologizing to the community, launched a water quality program called “At the Tap,” and spent months handing out bottles of treated water at community events — proving the product one conversation at a time.

We put the measure back on the ballot and it passed. If it hadn’t, Tucson’s future as a growing metropolitan area was in serious jeopardy. The full story has been chronicled in Tucson Water Turnaround, published by the American Water Works Association.

Building Culver Connect

Culver City had an opportunity to become the infrastructure backbone of the streaming economy — but no municipal fiber network, no funding source, and no precedent for a city our size attempting it.

I started by commissioning a feasibility study, then building support in the local business community. To fund the project, I identified an unconventional source: the sale of a city-owned movie theater complex downtown. I then secured a private-sector partner to design and construct the network.

The hardest part came after the fiber was in the ground. Attracting customers to a product that wasn’t yet complete, from a city with no track record as a service provider, was a slow and sometimes scary process. I spent a year alongside our construction partner going door to door in the business community, attending conferences, and making the case one prospect at a time. It was a firsthand education in what a “ramp-up period” means for a new venture — and why so many fail before the market catches up.

Eventually anchor customers came aboard, including Apple and Ting, which now uses the network as the backbone for a fiber-to-the-home buildout across Culver City. The project helped position the city as a destination for Amazon Studios, Apple, TikTok, and Warner/HBO — earning Culver City its reputation as a capital of the streaming economy.

Financing the Overland Park Convention Center

The City of Overland Park had the vision for a first-class convention center and hotel — but no politically viable way to pay for it. The political environment would not allow the city to backstop the necessary debt with its general fund, and without a financing structure, the project was dead.

I made trips to New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, sitting across from institutional bond investors and working through possible deal structures. It was not easy going. The breakthrough came when we developed a structure that isolated the debt to the city’s transient occupancy tax alone — keeping the general fund untouched. That structure satisfied both the institutional investors who needed security and the elected officials who needed political cover.

The result was the 412-room Sheraton Overland Park Hotel and the adjacent 262,000-square-foot Overland Park Convention Center, which has been repeatedly recognized as one of the best small convention centers in North America.