In the Room

Your phone knows what the City Council voted on before you finish your coffee.

You can read the Secretary of State’s election procedures manual, the regional transportation plan, and the Phoenix Art Museum’s annual report on one screen in one sitting. An AI assistant will summarize all three for you, in whatever tone you prefer, in less time than it takes the light rail to cross Central Avenue.

We have never been more connected to the information about our city.

And we have never been further from the rooms where our city is decided.

The Paradox

I spent years building the technology that made this possible, and I believe in it. I also see what it has quietly done to civic life.

Information used to be scarce, and the room was where you found it. Now the information is everywhere, and the room is what has become scarce. You can know everything about how Maricopa County tabulates a ballot and never once sit across from the person who runs the count. You can read every line of the regional transportation plan and never ask its author the one question that matters to your block.

Connection is not access. A notification is not a seat. And a city that lets its leaders become well-informed spectators is a city that will be decided by someone else.

If you run something in this city, you already know where you stand. Most of us, if we are honest, are closer to the screen than the room.

Convene, Decide, Build

Phoenix Community Alliance was formed in 1983 by business leaders who believed the center of this city deserved better than it had, and who were willing to do something about it. One of their first causes was bringing the Phoenix Suns Downtown. They did not commission a study and wait. They convened, they decided, and they went to work with the City. The Suns play Downtown.

That sequence, convene, decide, build, is the whole of what PCA has done for more than forty years, and it is what separates us from the think tanks with which we are sometimes confused. A white paper is the end of their work and the beginning of ours. When PCA convenes a conversation, the next thing that happens is a Committee meeting, where Members carry what was said into a policy position, a partnership with the City, a project. A think tank explains a city. Phoenix Community Alliance builds one.

You might say the business community already does this. It sits on boards, it gives generously, it reads the briefings. And you would be right. But a leader who has read about a system and a leader who has sat across from the person who runs it advocate differently, and advocacy is where PCA’s work lives. A Member who knows the Elections Director, or the Transit Director, or the Secretary of State, and understands how their operation actually works, speaks for Downtown with more precision and more credibility. That is why we built the series.

Why We Built the Series

Conversations in Leadership is PCA’s executive convening series. The idea is simple. Take one force shaping Greater Phoenix. Find the people who run it, not the people who comment on it. Put them in a small room with the leaders building Downtown, and let the Committees do the rest.

In April, during Arizona Tech Week, we put every level of the transportation system on one stage for The Future of Mobility: the state through ADOT, the region through MAG, the county through MCDOT, and the city through Phoenix Public Transit, with Gartner as our Underwriter and expert moderator. The conversation ran from robotaxis mapping Downtown to the fight for the curb on Washington Street. Matt Arvay, Gartner’s Managing Director, saw what the room could do and has since joined PCA’s Board of Directors.

In May, for The Quantum Frontier, more than fifty of the region’s technology and civic leaders gathered on Center Stage at the Herberger Theater Center to hear Panch Panchanathan, the former Director of the National Science Foundation now leading the City’s quantum strategy, explain why ASU keeps betting on Downtown. EPAM Systems, our Underwriter and co-host, had come to evaluate Phoenix. Lisa Smith, the executive leading EPAM’s Mountain Southwest region and its Arizona launch, now sits on PCA’s Board.

In August, in Singer Hall at the Phoenix Art Museum, the Arts & Culture Leadership Forum put a number on the table: $449.9 million, the size of Phoenix’s arts and culture sector, with attendance still well below 2019. The sector did not ask the room for a check. It asked for a seat at the planning table, and that request is now in front of our Arts, Culture & Public Life Committee.

Three conversations. Three Committees carrying them forward. Now the fourth, and the one I believe matters most.

The Business of Democracy

For three consecutive election cycles, Maricopa County has run the most scrutinized elections in the United States. The world watched the count. Every procedure, every timeline, every envelope was questioned by someone, somewhere, in real time.

Here is what most of the world never saw. Behind the count is an operation, and it looks a great deal like the ones the people reading this run every day. It has a workforce: a temporary army hired, trained, and deployed in a matter of weeks. It has a supply chain: ballots printed on demand, envelopes tracked, equipment tested and sealed. It has a technology stack: electronic poll books, signature verification, high-speed tabulation, post-election audits, and a cybersecurity posture that has to hold against adversaries most companies will never face. And now it has artificial intelligence arriving on both sides of the ledger, as a tool inside the election office and as an engine for the misinformation aimed at it, which means the companies that build the platforms where voters get their information are now part of the operation whether they planned to be or not.

People, processes, and technology. That is what the title of our October forum means. Democracy is not an event that happens on a Tuesday in November. It is a business, run by professionals, and every other business in this city rests on it. Capital does not land in a region whose institutions it does not trust. Companies do not relocate to a state whose elections they cannot explain to their boards. A region’s confidence in its own institutions is an economic asset, as real as a transit line or a research campus.

Every business in this city depends on one operation it has never toured.

On Thursday, October 15, Phoenix Community Alliance is taking the tour. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, Maricopa County Elections Director Scott Jarrett, and Phoenix City Clerk Denise Archibald will share one stage, for the first time before the Downtown business community, to walk through how the operation runs: who does the work, how the processes are built and tested, what technology sits underneath, and where all of it is heading. Beside them will be the fourth voice the subject now requires. David J. Lopez is Google’s Global Lead for Civic Responsibility on its Trust & Safety team, the part of the company responsible for how its products handle election information and the manipulation aimed at it. The officials on this stage run the operation; he works on the information environment it has to run inside. Putting both in one conversation, in Arizona, three weeks before an election, is the reason this forum exists. Bill Gates, who as Chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors was the public face of the county’s elections through 2020, 2022, and 2024, and who now leads Arizona State University’s Mechanics of Democracy Laboratory from its Downtown campus, will moderate. MODL is our partner in building the forum and recruited the panel.

The venue is its own argument. The forum will be held in the First Amendment Forum at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, a room named for the right that lets a citizen ask how their government works and expect an answer. On October 15, three of the people who run Arizona’s elections, and one of the people who shapes what voters see about them, will stand in that room and answer.

Let me be precise about what this is and is not. The Business of Democracy is voter education and election administration: how elections work, how they are protected, and how the community can engage. There will be no candidates, no races, and no politics in the room. PCA convenes; it does not campaign. We chose the weeks before November deliberately, because the business leaders of Downtown Phoenix should enter this cycle knowing how their own elections run, from the people who run them, and knowing those people by name.

Be in the Room

You might say you are too busy in October, and you would be telling the truth. Everyone in that room will be. The question is not whether you have an hour. It is whether, when someone at your next board meeting asks how confident they should be in Arizona’s elections, you want to answer from a headline or from the room.

The forum is convened for Phoenix Community Alliance Members, and the room is small by design. Invitations come through PCA. If you want to be in it, write to me at dpapa@dtphx.org and I will tell you how. If you are not yet a Member and want to be in this room and the ones that follow, write to me anyway, and we will talk about that too.

The Business of Democracy: The People, Processes, and Technology Behind Arizona’s Elections Administration

Thursday, October 15, 2026  |  Late afternoon, reception to follow

First Amendment Forum, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, 555 N. Central Ave., Downtown Phoenix

In partnership with Arizona State University’s Mechanics of Democracy Laboratory. PCA Members only. Invitations through PCA.

If you care about this city, really care, this is the room to join.

The Room

Your phone will still know what happened before you finish your coffee the next morning. It will have a summary ready, in whatever tone you prefer.

For one hour on October 15, you can know it first, in a room named for the right to ask, from the people who hold the answers. Phoenix Community Alliance was formed by people who understood that a city is not decided on a screen. It is decided in a room, by the people who chose to enter it.

Come be one of them.

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Formed in 1983, Phoenix Community Alliance (PCA) is the nonprofit membership affiliate of Downtown Phoenix Inc. (DPI) and the preeminent business leadership and advocacy organization serving Greater Downtown Phoenix. Working with a diverse, influential, and growing membership, PCA fulfills its mission to activate, advocate, and build the Phoenix we all want. For more information, visit phoenixcommunityalliance.com.