Ava’s law

A bill’s second life … Walk to the polls … And we never pegged her for an election denier.

Gretchen Jacobs isn’t a stranger to the state Legislature.

She’s been a successful lobbyist for nearly 30 years representing major communications and insurance corporations at Arizona’s Capitol.

Now, she’s doing her own bidding.

Jacobs started lobbying for legislation last year in honor of her daughter Ava, who is autistic and nonverbal. In 2021, Ava was molested by a teacher’s aide at Chaparral High School.

The aide, Nicholas Alan Claus, was offered a plea deal and sentenced to 90 days in jail. The Scottsdale Unified School District said he passed a standard background check, but Jacobs said the school didn’t contact prior employers about his conduct.

Now, Jacobs is starting her second year pushing legislation aimed at a single clause in Arizona’s statutes that has left several school districts legally unaccountable for hiring employees who abuse children.

Arizona law requires school districts to conduct a criminal record check and make “good faith efforts” to contact previous employers before hiring someone. Jacobs said she got a hold of Claus’ personnel file as part of a civil suit against the school district when they admitted they wouldn’t have hired him if they knew what his past employers had to say.

But Arizona law also says a public organization isn’t liable for crimes its employees commit unless they know that employee was likely to commit that crime.

Jacobs argues the civil immunity clause incentivizes school districts to avoid calling references for potential employees. If they don’t know about someone’s past transgressions, they can’t be held liable when they commit them again.

Jacobs sued the Scottsdale school district and won the case. Other families haven’t been so lucky.

A family sued the Tucson Unified School District after police found then-behavioral health aide Michael Corum had taken compromising photos of their daughter, who has developmental disabilities, and arrested him in 2011.

Court cases revealed Corum was fired from his previous employer for inappropriately touching a patient, but TUSD couldn’t prove they called that employer before hiring Corum.

A trial court and appeals court found TUSD wasn’t liable, and both pointed to the immunity clause that says public entities aren’t on the hook for felonies their employees commit unless they knew about a “propensity for that action.”

Republican Sen. Shawnna Bolick sponsored the same bill last year to get rid of the immunity clause and hold public entities liable if an employee commits a sexual offense against a child with a disability if they don’t obtain background information before hiring them.

The bill passed the House and Senate with bipartisan support. But Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed it because the legislation was not “carefully tailored and thoughtfully executed.”

Several Democratic lawmakers and education-sector stakeholders took issue with part of the bill that called for evidence that an entity failed to investigate or take reasonable action on a violation of a school’s “written policy.”

Then-Sen. Christine Marsh said that language could lead to unintended consequences if a school district eliminates safety policies to avoid being found in violation of them.

Some then-dissenting lawmakers, like Democratic Sen. Analise Ortiz, said this year’s version of the bill fixes her concerns, and she’s co-sponsoring the legislation.

Jacobs said she’s enduring another year of tedious committee hearings because, unlike the legislation she pushes in her day job as a lobbyist, this bill is personal to her.

“It brings some meaning to what happened to (Ava). Something positive can result from it,” she said. “I want to make sure that all parents can trust that when they send their kids to school, the people who work with them have been fully background checked, and they're safe people.”

The legislation also has an entirely new sponsor: Democratic Sen. Catherine Miranda.

Miranda said she held several stakeholder meetings throughout December with groups like Arizona School Administrators and the Arizona School Risk Retention Trust, which provides liability coverage to public schools. While those groups opposed last year’s version of the bill, Miranda got rid of a section they said was too vague, and said they’re on board this year.

But she knows it won’t be easy.

Miranda is a Democrat championing a Republican’s former bill in a Republican-dominated Legislature. Any changes to the bill could disillusion the stakeholders, and Miranda noted: “There's a different atmosphere every session, and this session is definitely a different atmosphere.”

But it’s also personal for the senator. When she was in seventh grade, Miranda was assaulted by her teacher.

“I healed over the years,” she said. “And until the stakeholder meeting started, I realized, wow, there's a purpose in why maybe I need to lead this. Because it's unacceptable, and I know it's happening in schools.”

Miranda also made another change to this year’s version of the bill: It’s officially titled “Ava’s Law.”

Vote local: Republican lawmakers are pushing two measures to outlaw the use of “voting centers” and revert to only allowing voters to cast a ballot at their local polling place rather than any voting location in the county, the Arizona Capitol Times’ Jakob Thorington writes. The bill, HB2017 is veto bait, but the resolution, HCR2002, would bypass the governor and ask voters to decide the issue directly in the next election. Meanwhile, former Navajo Nation President and Congressional candidate Jonathan Nez argues in the Republic opinion pages that “late early” ballots aren’t the main driver of slow election results, and Republicans’ bills to speed up election counting would only make it more difficult to vote, especially for older and rural Arizonans.

“The actual cause for county governments taking more than a week to accurately count the ballots is that they don’t have the staff or the equipment to quickly verify and count the glut of early ballots that come in in the last few days before the deadline,” he wrote.

Do Trump endorsements mean nothing?: Republican activists at the AZGOP meeting last weekend much preferred U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs over his likely gubernatorial GOP primary rival, Karrin Taylor Robson, who got a big round of boos from the crowd there, the Phoenix New Times’ Stephen Lemons writes. With Biggs running for governor, six Republicans have already filed statements of interest to run for his seat next year: Omar Chaudhry, state Rep. Travis Grantham, Kelley Mackaig, Will McDermott, Lisa Schaefer and Alex Stovall.

A major award: Gov. Katie Hobbs announced she was spending $60 million in federal pandemic funding on water projects, including sending almost $15 million to the Water Infrastructure Finance Authority (WIFA). In her first year as governor, she cut $333 million that former Gov. Doug Ducey had promised to WIFA.

The politicians are throwing around millions, while the local press that holds them accountable is just hoping you’ll pay $12 so we can keep doing this.

The nut doesn’t fall far: Cochise County Supervisor Tom Crosby’s kid, David Caleb Crosby, was among the hundreds pardoned for attempting to steal the presidency for Donald Trump by storming Congress in 2020, the Herald/Review’s Terri Jo Neff reports. He allegedly assaulted some cops, along with other federal offenses. His father is heading to court this week to stand trial on felony charges of interfering with the 2022 election.

Second first: The first female speaker of the Navajo Nation, Crystalyne Curley, won her reelection to the post this week, the Republic’s Arlyssa Becenti reports.

Mid-life crisis: Northern Arizona has old aspen trees. And young aspen trees. But not a lot of mid-life aspen trees, which means we’re going to have some gaps when the old trees die, Mike Stoddard, a forest ecologist at Northern Arizona University, explained to KJZZ’s Mark Brodie on “The Show.”

“You know, I'm one of the people that love to consider the glass is definitely half full. I feel like these ecosystems are a lot more resilient than we give them credit for,” Stoddard said.

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On Tuesday, the A.I. Agenda generated all the AI bills Arizona lawmakers should be considering (but aren’t) and explained that while everyone wants Sam Altman’s “monuments in the desert,” those monuments require a monumental amount of water.

Today’s Education Agenda teaches you the history of the Aggregate Expenditure Limit with someone who was in the trenches 45 years ago when voters first adopted it. And we check in on memorable lawmaker turned school board president Leezah Sun.

And in tomorrow’s Water Agenda, we’re looking at what happens when the housing crisis meets the water crisis. Spoiler: it’s lawsuits.

Is Gov. Katie Hobbs an election denier?

Or just an election resenter?

A reader pointed out that Hobbs notably left out two of Arizona’s members of Congress in her “letter to our congressional delegation” asking them to oppose the federal funding freeze.

We could chalk this up to an oversight.

But the fact that the two she forgot were ultra-MAGA Republicans Paul Gosar and Abe Hamadeh is very suspicious.