Freedom isn't Free
And quality news costs money to produce ... Sub sandwiches may be free, if you vote yes ... And Mark Lamb is still running?
For the last 30 months, we’ve delivered you the best daily political newsletter in Arizona, packed with all the interviews, explainers and scoops that two of the hardest-working reporters can provide.
And we’ve done it all for free.
Well, we charge $12 per month. But that price has always been optional, and paying for the Agenda doesn’t actually get you anything you can’t get for free.
Starting March 1, that changes.
We’re putting up a paywall.
We’re not going to kick out our 8,000+ free subscribers. But we are going to cut back on what you’ll get for free. Pretty significantly.
We hope that doing so will ultimately allow us to provide more value for all our readers — the paid ones and the free ones.
Hear us out…
We’re determined to hire another reporter. A paywall is the surest way for us to get there sustainably this year.
Thousands of you read the Agenda every single day but have never paid for it. Why would you? It’s free! But if just a fraction of you daily free readers clicked this button, we could hire an additional reporter today.
We’re a tiny operation! Another reporter would bring us to 150% capacity. We could provide free readers all the value they’re used to and more — and still go the extra mile for those who support us financially.
And most of all, it would give us the bandwidth for more in-depth pieces that are difficult to juggle when it’s all hands on deck for the daily newsletter.
We know some of you will simply never pay for the Agenda. That’s ok! We love you free readers anyway. And we won’t abandon you.
Arizona is at a perilous moment. We want to be here to help you make sense of it all.
But in the long run, putting nothing behind a paywall shortchanges even our free readers, who would be better served by a bigger, stronger press corps digging up more important, uncovered stories, even if they occasionally hit that paywall.
Why subscribe today instead of waiting for March 1?
Starting today, we’re offering a 30% discount on the first year of your annual subscription. You can get a full election year of this stuff and support a growing local news startup for just $84.
Monday, it’ll drop down to a 25% discount, and it’ll decrease every day until March 1, when we start to paywall some content.
So click the button now and save some money.
What’s going behind the paywall?
Who knows?!
Some days, we might just give free readers a teaser of the top of the email. Some days, they may not receive our curated links, laugh or various other rotating sections. Some stories we may send to our paid subscribers first, and our free readers later. We’re going to mix it up to see what works.
The goal is to find the right balance between still providing value for our free readers, but providing more value for those who pay to support the Agenda.
Why should I pay for local news anyway?
Well, that’s part of a longer conversation we will have with you over the next month as we prepare to put up this paywall.
But for today, let’s just say local news is in a crisis. More than 500 journalists were laid off in this country in January alone. And we’re trying to build something new to sustain our little pocket of the industry.
Did we mention the discount?
I’m a paid subscriber and I really love the Agenda. How can I help it get to the next level?
Wow, how kind of you to ask! You can upgrade your subscription to a “Founding Member” by following these simple steps. You’re the best!
When asked if he thinks he should get a property tax break for the criminal activity that’s driven customers away from his sandwich shop, Joe Faillace said: “Hell yeah!”
That’s what Republican lawmakers who work just blocks away from his restaurant, Old Station Subs, are trying to do. Senate President Warren Petersen is proposing Senate Concurrent Resolution 1006, which would ask voters to decide if they can apply for a property tax refund if a city, town or county fails to “abate a public nuisance” that impacts their property values.
Faillace estimates he pays around $3,700 a year in property taxes, but “that's not even close” to the revenue loss he’s sustained from “the Zone,” or the sprawling homeless camps that were dismantled after Faillace joined other business owners to sue Phoenix over the conditions.
The Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank, brought the bill to Petersn with a way property owners could get their money back from property value loss or expenses from beefing up security for public nuisances like visible homelessness that cities don’t adequately manage. Speaker Ben Toma is also pushing the bill in the House, and the coupling of mirrored bills sponsored by each chamber’s top officials suggests the legislation is a priority.
“When we have citizens who break laws, the government has a lot of tools to go after citizens who don't follow the law,” Petersen said at a Senate committee hearing. “But when our government doesn't follow the law, or doesn't enforce the law, our citizens are limited on what they can do.”
Cities say the idea is “unconstitutional, illegal and unwise” and would punish cities if they couldn’t enforce nuisance laws and ordinances “at all times, everywhere, and against everyone.”
And if they failed, they would lose the very funding they need to do more policing.
Municipalities would have to go to superior court to challenge the refund requests, in turn creating a likely litany of taxpayer-funded lawsuits for localities to keep the state-shared revenues the state would take to refund property taxes.
An attorney for the League of Arizona Cities and Towns hit back with a legal analysis sent to the Senate rules attorney. That Senate Rules Committee meetings aren’t recorded, so we’re not sure what lawmakers had to say about it. But the League’s General Counsel Nancy Davidson warned the bill could be “financially ruinous, requiring unprecedented cuts in vital public services and even triggering a default on a municipality’s existing obligations.”
The group also cites a Ninth Circuit ruling that prohibits sweeping camps when the people living in them have nowhere else to go. The bill also doesn’t provide a funding source but instead relies on taking away funding from cities, making it an “unfunded mandate” that violates the state constitution, the league argues.
And it seems the bill will flip the legal process on its head — instead of property owners having to prove the refund they’re requesting is reasonable, the city would have to prove it’s unreasonable.
“I took a lot of logic classes in college, and proving a negative is really difficult,” Sen. Mitzi Epstein said at a Senate hearing on the bill.
Gonna be a long year: Republican legislative leaders sued Secretary of State Adrian Fontes over his elections procedures manual, the document that spells out how elections must be administered. Among their myriad complaints, Republicans took issue with the provision of the document stating that if county supervisors refuse to certify their county’s election, the state will just certify the election without those votes, Votebeat’s Jen Fifield reports. Meanwhile, county election officials are mounting a full-court press blaming lawmakers, and notably, Gov. Katie Hobbs, for dallying in the face of Arizona’s election timeline crisis. They say they need a “clean” solution to get signed into law before February 9 or risk throwing “the U.S. Presidential Election into chaos.”
“What we don’t need is an all-you-can-legislate buffet of unrelated policy changes,” Arizona Association of Counties Executive Director Jen Marson said in a press release.
Drug test school board members: Mesa Public Schools joined an initiative to make its public meetings more public and accessible with ideas like live public feedback during meetings, the East Valley Tribune’s Scott Shumaker reports. In Mohave County, lawmakers have a bill to save money by consolidating the local school districts’ administration under the county superintendent of schools, who does not like the idea, Madeline Armstrong writes in Today’s News-Herald. And in Payson, local school board members backed off an idea to randomly drug test all student-athletes after coaches raised privacy issues, Peter Aleshire writes in the Payson Roundup.
WSJ is a union paper: Hobbs’ version of the Prop 123 extension “funds union priorities” rather than teach pay, per the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which said that when Republican lawmakers pass their better Prop 123 plan, Hobbs should support it at the ballot.
“Helping sink the program would be self-defeating for Ms. Hobbs and her union backers. But their position on funding shows that their real priority is increasing dues-paying union members, not improving classroom instruction,” the editorial board wrote.
Maybe she can get a job with DeWit: U.S. Senate GOP frontrunner Kari Lake’s campaign has a mere $1 million cash on hand (if you don’t include all the debt) as of the latest fundraising deadline, per Politico. Independent U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has about $11 million and Democratic challenger U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego has about $7 million cash on hand. Meanwhile, a couple of QAnon spreaders are hosting a fundraiser for Lake today at their Prescott mansion. Mike Pence once backed out of a fundraiser with them.
Just a coincidence: Nearly half of Scottdale Mayor David Ortega’s political contributions from the past two years came from employees of local development firm Riot Hospitality Group, which successfully killed a competitor’s plan to build a new restaurant in Old Town last month after Ortega’s deciding vote, the Repubilc’s Sam Kmack reports. Employees donated $36,000 total, but the mayor denies any conflict of interest.
Overseeing the overseer: Documents from the city of Phoenix show the departure of former Director of the Office of Accountability and Transparency Roger Smith was rooted in internal disagreements after the department head clashed with his bosses over the independence of his position and was issued a "performance improvement plan" the Republic’s Taylor Seely and Miguel Torres report. Smith was barred from hiring a woman, who then wrote a letter to the city council claiming the rescinding of her job offer was an inappropriate blurring of lines between the oversight office and city attorney.
Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, who is apparently still running for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, wants you to know “the information that the mainstream media feeds you is what’s false,” after news outlets fact-checked his claims that migrants are getting gift cards, phones and airline tickets and cash from President Joe Biden.
He then fact-checked himself and also found he was not quite right.
“The government isn't directly distributing funds to these individuals. No…Instead, they deployed Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) … to funnel millions of our hard-earned tax dollars directly to the pockets of illegal immigrants,” he wrote in an email to supporters.
Since comments are no longer allowed on AZ Central...this is it. Comments are important. This is the most important election cycle in my lifetime. All hands on deck.
There are only so many hours in the day- and I want to be an informed citizen. Watching local TV news hardly gives you any in depth coverage- they would rather report car accidents... and the Republic is somewhat adequate, but not comprehensive. The Agenda gives me more information about behind-the scenes workings, helps me understand how the state legislature actually works, who is who and who did what before. All in 5-10 minutes. It is worth the money.