Following Pima County’s lead, Tucson officials instructed city administrators to create new transparency rules for non-disclosure agreements tied to economic development projects, part of a broader shift in policy following the public outrage over how the Project Blue proposal was handled.
“There were a lot of challenges we experienced leading up to Project Blue,” said council member Nikki Lee, who proposed the new rules. “I think it would be useful for us to consider something similar [to the county] in the spirit of transparency.”
Elected officials for both the city of Tucson and Pima County said they wished they had more information about Project Blue, a massive data center proposed for Tucson — and could have shared more with the public — but said non-disclosure agreements limited what they could say…