Better than us Hacks

Trolling is his love language ... How to secretly record your friends and influence people ... And alligator lore brings election anxiety.

Sometimes a lawmaker trolling you can actually be a good thing. 

Like when Republican Rep. Alex Kolodin explained his vote yesterday on House Bill 2595, which would allow a monument honoring murdered journalist Don Bolles on the Arizona Capitol lawn. 

“Don Bolles, as opposed to the current hacks we have in the liberal media, was actually a newsman,” Kolodin explained. 

In case you somehow missed it,¹ last year we convinced a few lawmakers to file a bill to allow a monument on the Capitol lawn honoring Bolles, who was killed by a car bomb in 1976 while investigating crime and corruption in Arizona. 

Last year’s bill passed the state House on a 45-15 vote, but it died in the Senate after Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman refused to put it up for a hearing in his Senate Government Committee. 

In our postmortem analysis of our experiment in lobbying, there was a consensus that our help wasn’t exactly helpful. Frequently mocking fake elector and troll farmer Hoffman in this newsletter is apparently not a great overall lobbying strategy. So this year, we’re not involved in the effort, other than being fans. 

Six Republicans who voted against last year’s bill flipped their votes yesterday and supported it, including Kolodin, who said he hopes today’s reporters will see it and learn what it means “to do real reporting, to take real risks, to uncover things that go against the powerful and put your life on the line for it instead of just spouting the DNC narrative and pretending that is objective journalism.”

Whatever gets you there, Alex!

The real problem is still in the Senate, where the bill is almost certain to be assigned to Hoffman’s committee again. A committee chair can stop a bill in its tracks. Perhaps Hoffman has had time to study up on Bolles’ history and change his mind. But he doesn’t strike us as the studying type. 

Of course, there are ways around an obstinate chairman. But any path through or around Hoffman would require Republican supporters of the bill to be willing to buck him, and that just doesn’t seem likely.

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Meanwhile, a Facebook fan page with ties to the Bolles family announced that his 1976 Datsun 710 “will be on permanent display” at the Phoenix Police Museum.

However, the museum told us that’s jumping the gun. 

Museum curator Bryan Richards said he’s spoken with Diane Bolles, one of Bolles’ daughters, but whether the museum can house the car will be up to the museum’s directors. The museum already houses some memorabilia and would like to house the Bolles car, he said, but it’ll come down to logistics and funding. 

The Phoenix Police Department kept that iconic car as evidence for nearly two decades as the court cases played out, storing it unprotected and unpreserved and at times outdoors in an impound lot. Then the car moved to Washington D.C. as the centerpiece of an exhibit at the Newseum. But the Newseum shut down in 2019 and the car has been in storage in Maryland ever since. 

There was a previous effort to bring it back to Arizona. But basically every institution that might host it is awash in money from Kemper Marley, the mobbed-up liquor and land magnate who was implicated, though never charged, in Bolles’ death. Marley’s family has given millions to put the Marley name on university buildings, art museums and civic institutions.²

The Bolles family didn’t want the Datsun going anywhere with the Marley name on it, so it has remained in storage. 

Well, that backfired: Kari Lake’s secret recording of former GOP head Jeff DeWit bribing her to drop out of the Senate race has made Republicans tight-lipped in her presence, although several Arizona Republicans said they’ve always assumed Lake was recording them, The Washington Post’s Yvonne Wingett Sanchez reports, and it seems very likely there are more tapes. Meanwhile, new GOP chair Gina Swoboda renewed her $75,000 contract for six months of work with the Arizona Senate Elections Committee, Dillon Rosenblatt reports on Fourth Estate 48, raising questions about conflicts of interest and her access to sensitive voter materials as head of the state’s Republican party. 

If at first you don’t succeed: Government ethics experts are raising red flags after the Republic’s Stacey Barchenger found Gov. Kaite Hobbs had a meeting with the CEO of the Arizona Coyotes after voters rejected the team’s plans to build a hockey arena and entertainment district in Tempe. Coyotes CEO Xavier Gutierrez also appeared to have a meeting with Hobbs’ Chief of Staff Chad Campbell, who’s a former lobbyist for the hockey team and worked on the doomed Tempe campaign. The governor’s meeting happened weeks before the team applied to buy state trust land in north Phoenix. 

Fee freedom: Arizona’s House gave preliminary approval to a bill that would allow university students to stop the required fees they pay from going to certain organizations, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer reports. Rep. Alexander Kolodin, the bill’s sponsor, said Jewish students should have the right to decline to subsidize “calls for their own destruction,” specifically mentioning Students for Justice for Palestine, which has chapters at the state’s three universities. The Arizona Board of Regents has said it’s not sure how it would administer the proposal. The U.S. House passed a bill called the Agent Raul Gonzalez Officer Safety Act that would make it a federal crime to evade U.S. Customs and Border Protection, per AZPM’s Summer Hom. Gonzalez, the bill’s namesake, died in an ATV crash chase while chasing a group of migrants in Texas. And finally, the state House approved legislation to make “grooming” a crime. Eleven Democrats opposed it, saying current law already has a way to deal with inappropriate relationships between adults and children, per 12News’ Kevin Reagan.

Oversight is overdue: The Arizona Department of Health Services issued several citations to a Goodyear long-term care facility where a worker is accused of impregnating a patient, and the facility didn’t report allegations of sexual abuse to the state, per ABC 15’s Anne Ryman. Reports show the facility didn’t suspend the staff member until weeks after learning of the allegation.  

Who will adopt this district?: Phoenix Democrats have nominated three people to replace former Rep. Jennifer Longdon after she resigned last month. The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors will make the final call on whether to appoint former lawmaker Sarah Liguori, one-time secretary of state candidate Mark Robert Gordon³ or former candidate Brianna Westbrook as her replacement in Legislative District 5, per KJZZ’s Wayne Schutsky. The district currently has no representation in the House after former Rep. Amish Shah resigned less than a week after Longdon. Local precinct committeemen tried to nominate potential replacements for both lawmakers last night, but Democrats couldn’t agree and eventually, people started leaving the meeting. 

SoCal solar: A Southern California company is asking the feds to let it use water from a strained basin serving a small community in La Paz County to create carbon-free hydrogen fuel, the Republic’s Brandon Loomis reports. Heliogen would use land in Brenda, Arizona, to create a solar array, but locals fear the project would drain their wells.  

Just in case: Tucson City Council is set to vote on holding an August election to create a new city sales tax but hasn’t released any details on the taxation level or what it would pay for. The Tucson Sentinel’s Blake Morlock speculates the tax could be a contingency for the city to rely on its own funding instead of regional taxes amid a deeply embattled relationship with the Regional Transportation Authority, which is trying to plan another 20 year’s worth of infrastructure projects in Pima County. 

Yesterday, we tipped you off to a story about Mesa’s alligator lore.

But Mesa’s gator tale is so much weirder and runs so much deeper than we realized.  

Former reporter turned political hack and avid Agenda reader Robbie Sherwood pointed our attention to an article he wrote back in 1998. We’re always suspicious when someone claims to have written “the definitive Mesa alligator in the sewer story,” but in this case, he absolutely did. 

“I was familiar with the tale and mentioned it in the newsroom one day and was met with loud derision by this reporter named Clint Williams, who said, ‘Come on, Robbie, everyone knows that’s an urban legend. Alligators in the sewer, how could you fall for that?’ And everyone laughed at me. Burning with shame and embarrassment, I said to myself, ‘oh yeah, Clint, I’ll prove it.’ And so I started making calls,” he told us. 

The story has everything: A gator in lockup, a gator on a motorcycle, the mayor ratting out his own brother!

It ran on April Fools Day, but as far as we can tell, it’s all true. So without further ado, here is “the definitive story” on Mesa gators.

Click here to read the top and here for the jump to page A14.

Election anxiety is a real thing, Dr. Ayman Fanous, chair of the Psychiatry Department at the University of Arizona's College of Medicine in Phoenix, tells us via a fascinating interview with Lauren Gilger on KJZZ’s “The Show.”

Anxiety levels climb during election season, peak on Election Day, and decline after, as do prescription anti-anxiety meds and therapy sessions. 

“With anxiety at this level, it’s very hard to talk yourself down,” he said. “It sort of takes a life of its own and it’s accompanied by certain signs and symptoms, including restlessness, where a person might get fidgity and have a hard time sitting still. They might get irritable and snap at people for things that ordinarily would not anger them. There might be muscle tension, especially in the back and neck area. And of course that can be accompanied by headaches … insomnia … Bad dreams about the election.”

Check, check, check, check and check, doctor!

1. You must be new here. Welcome!

2. As the Republic’s Richard Ruelas noted, Marley’s name even hung over a PBS studio in ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism until a few years ago. 

3. Gordon, an election and voting rights attorney, attempted to run for secretary of state in 2018 against Katie Hobbs and claimed that his nominating petition sheets were stolen.