The Pima County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to expand transparency rules for non-disclosure agreements and widen the county’s review process for major development projects that use large amounts of water or electricity.
The board voted 4-1 to update two policies governing non-disclosure agreements and enhanced reviews of major development projects. District 4 Supervisor Steve Christy cast the lone vote against both changes.
“It’s really adding other land development projects,” Carmine Debonis Jr., the county’s deputy administrator, explained at the meeting. “It previously identified economic development projects, but we know that there are other land use projects where we may get approached about entering into an NDA.”
The changes also clarified that the county administrator must provide supervisors with a report detailing projects subject to an NDA.
They also expand the county’s enhanced due diligence process to cover other projects that use large amounts of water or electricity and to include the reactivation of previously inactive NDAs.
The policies and changes are summarized in the meeting memo.
The board first adopted the policies in September 2025 after secretive negotiations surrounding Project Blue, the massive data center proposed south of Tucson, prompted widespread criticism from residents over how little information was made public before supervisors voted to sell county-owned land for the project.
At the time, supervisors described the new policies as “lessons learned” from Project Blue. They required more transparency around non-disclosure agreements and created a broader review of the environmental, public health and resource impacts of proposed economic development projects.
Crédito: Noor Haghighi Credit: Noor Haghighi
Board Chair Jen Allen, who has pushed for the changes since the Project Blue controversy, said Tuesday that she remains uncomfortable with the use of non-disclosure agreements in government.
“The obscuring of information from the public and the sort of lack of transparency that they create, I just think is problematic for government,” Allen said.
But she supported the revisions as a way of placing stronger limits around when and how the county can use them.
“Like all tools, they occasionally need to be sharpened and refined,” Allen said.
Under the revised policy, non-disclosure agreements will no longer apply only to economic development projects. The county expanded the rules to include NDAs involving “other land development projects.”
The meeting memo also included a sample letter to companies asking them to adhere to new policies within 30 days to keep existing NDAs active.
Supervisors also expanded the county’s “Enhanced Due Diligence” policy, which requires county staff to take a deeper look at the potential effects of certain major projects.
Previously, the policy focused on economic development projects. The new version explicitly extends that scrutiny to other projects that would use large quantities of water or electricity.
Under the new policy, a project can trigger the enhanced review if it anticipates using at least 10,000 centum cubic feet of water per month on average annually, roughly 7.48 million gallons, or if construction or upgrading of a power substation with an input voltage of 115 kilovolts or greater would be required.
Reviews can involve numerous county departments, including Environmental Quality, Regional Flood Control, Development Services, Regional Wastewater Reclamation, Conservation Lands and Resources and the Health Department. The county can also seek information from utility providers, municipalities, tribal governments and other outside agencies.
The county administrator will then provide supervisors with a preliminary report compiling the findings and recommendations. As a project advances, supervisors can receive additional reports examining issues including growth-inducing impacts, environmental justice, water and energy use, extreme heat and wildfire risks, alternatives considered by the developer and the developer’s past performance.
“I think this policy is a great step towards putting in place transparency and creating some process by which a little bit of the NDA can be retained, but setting some clear communication about what that process is and when it ends and what can and cannot be obscured,” Allen said.
The policies trace back to the public uproar over Project Blue.
In June 2025, supervisors voted 3-2 to sell about 290 acres of county-owned land near the Pima County Fairgrounds to Beale Infrastructure for the data center development.
Many details of the project had been kept from the public under non-disclosure agreements. Arizona Luminaria later reported, based on an internal county memo, that Amazon was expected to operate the data center. A nondisclosure agreement showed that Pima County had agreed to keep Amazon Web Services’ role in Project Blue confidential for five years.
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