Good news!

A look on the bright side … The hot seat … And a chair to nap in.

The news is depressing.

Our country is devolving into fascism. People who entered the country legally are being arrested at courthouses, while congressional Republicans are advancing a bill to slash the Medicaid funding that about 2 million Arizonans rely on.

There’s no shortage of bad news. In fact, it’s overwhelming.

And it’s those awful, pervasive stories that we find ourselves writing about most frequently, because they affect you the most.

But after a long Memorial Day weekend, we wanted to share some palate-cleansing good news to start your week off right. Not as an act of avoidance, but because if we don’t focus on the positive every once in a while, we’ll all go crazy.

Positive Trends

Arizona has a lot of concerning data trends to worry about, like public school spending and housing affordability. But some statewide themes are moving in a positive direction.

The number of deaths caused by opioids and heat, which take a lot of lives in Arizona, is down.

Across the country, drug overdose deaths declined nearly 24% last year, per the CDC, marking the fewest opioid deaths within a year since June 2020. In Arizona, opioid deaths decreased by 27%.

And while last summer, Maricopa County had a record number of consecutive days over 100 degrees — we did see the first decrease in heat-related deaths since 2014.

Volunteers and City of Phoenix employees are keeping people from dying in the triple-digit heat by handing out resources like water and sunscreen and setting up a network of heat relief stations throughout Maricopa County. Plus, Phoenix is investing $60 million to plant 27,000 trees and build 550 shade structures throughout the next five years, and public parks are getting some cool art installations that provide heat relief.

Arizona’s Family found homicides decreased in Phoenix over the last three years, although trespassing calls are increasing with the number of homeless individuals in public spaces.

Things also seem to be looking up for the Mexican wolf population. For the ninth straight year in a row, the number of endangered wolves grew in Arizona and New Mexico after the species faced extinction because of habitat loss and targeted exterminations. It looks like conservation efforts are working.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes is pulling out a lot of wins for the state, too. Her office’s lawsuits against the Trump administration have stopped the president from closing the Department of Education, and Mayes joined 23 other states to secure a preliminary injunction that stopped billions of dollars worth of public health cuts.

Other good news you might have missed

Amid the inundation of crises this year, a lot of heartwarming stories got lost in the mix.

The Miami High School boys' baseball team,¹ for example, saved a woman and her dog after their home was set ablaze by a transformer explosion. The woman had her headphones in and didn’t hear the loud boom, but the high school boys stopped their game to help out.

And after ABC15 told its viewers about an elementary school library in desperate need of some TLC, Phoenix’s Edison Elementary School received boxes full of book donations. Fourth grader Penny Robles is stoked.

In Yavapai County, Buford the dog got an honorary certificate and rescue vest after he shepherded a toddler to safety who had wandered off seven miles from his home.

Meanwhile, Arizona’s state-of-the-art burn center got re-verified as a Level 1 adult and pediatric burn center, which means it meets strict standards for a high level of care. After the New Year's Eve fire in Hawaii, which only has one burn center, the Arizona Burn Center in Phoenix took in six critically burned patients.

And while our state lawmakers aren’t doing much this year, they did unanimously pass a new statewide alert system for missing Indigenous or endangered persons that Gov. Katie Hobbs signed into law in a ceremony with Indigenous leaders.

Emily’s law is named after Emily Pike, a 14-year-old member of the San Carlos Apache Tribe who was found dead earlier this year. Currently, Arizona isn’t required to issue a public alert when people over 18 go missing, and the new Turquoise Alert System will help coordinate responses to missing Indigenous people. Arizona has the third-largest number of unresolved cases of missing Indigenous people in the country.

And after parents and advocates lobbied lawmakers to keep funding the Parents as Paid Caregivers program that lets parents get paid for taking over the care of their kids with severe developmental disabilities, lawmakers continued the program without sneaking in Republican plans that would slash it.

That funding fight will renew within budget deliberations for the next fiscal year, but it was a touching example of successful advocacy.

It’s those touching moments and success stories that keep us going during times like this.

Heat waves and death row: Gov. Katie Hobbs assembled a task force to come up with heat safety standards for government employees, and while employers already have to ensure safe workspaces, they could use more guidance when it comes to working in 100-degree weather, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer reports. Tucson and Phoenix already have heat safety plans to keep people from dying in the heat. Speaking of death, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office plans to execute death row prisoner Richard Kenneth Djerf in August or early September, per the Arizona Mirror’s Michael Kiefer. Djerf murdered four members of a west Phoenix family in 1993, and his death will be the second state execution since a retired federal judge magistrate found Arizona carries out flawed fatal injections.

Chips ain’t cheap: TSMC says Donald Trump’s tariff scheme could delay progress on its plans to expand its semiconductor plants in Arizona, sending a letter to the feds last month saying the tariffs “will result in higher project costs and could delay progress,” per the Daily Independent’s Brent Ruffner.

The courts get to decide: Even though Arizona’s voters resoundingly voted to pass the right to abortion in the state Constitution, a lot of those rights still have to be activated in court, Axios’ Jeremy Duda writes. The Arizona Medical Association is challenging three abortion policies they say violate the voter-approved initiative, Prop 139, like banning telehealth for abortion care and requiring patients to get an ultrasound 24 hours before an abortion.

Poof: ICE agents who were arresting people outside the Phoenix immigration court last week disappeared on Friday — with the same level of explanation and notice as when they appeared, the Republic’s Richard Ruelas notes. Activists believe their protests might have helped stop the expedited deportations, but also think they could start again.

“A spokesperson for ICE would not specifically answer if the operations were over. Or just paused,” Ruelas writes.

Border buy-back: The federal budget bill might reimburse Arizona for the nearly $200 million the state spent on installing thousands of containers along the Arizona-Mexico border three years ago, Cronkite News’ Derry Lenehan reports. House Republicans put $12 billion in the bill to cover states’ costs on border security during the Biden administration. Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, put the state’s overall border security costs at more than $500 million. Meanwhile, the Washington Post examines the precarious status of the more than 1 million foreign students studying in the U.S. — including the 18,400 at ASU, making it the university with the fourth-largest international student population.

Parking lot purgatory: Glendale voters approved a measure to rezone a plot of land that the VAI resort wants to turn into a parking garage and office space, but not a connected measure to approve the general plan for the area, the Republic’s Corina Vanek reports. That leaves an unclear path forward for VAI’s major development plans there. Meanwhile, in Chandler, Mayor Kevin Hartke's former opponent is suing him and the city over potential term limit violations within Chandler’s charter, which suggests people can’t serve more than two consecutive terms, per the Republic’s Lauren De Young. Hartke served two back-to-back terms as a council member before becoming mayor. Chandler’s City Council is getting another legal opinion on the charter language and contemplating holding a special election to change the term limits language.

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Full of solid legal theories: Fake elector lawyer Tim La Sota filed a complaint against Kris Mayes, asking Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell to investigate whether she used state resources for her political campaign by talking trash about two vulnerable Republican congressmen: David Schweikert and Juan Ciscomani, the conservative AZFree News reports. And after Mayes was forced to go back to square one on her fake electors prosecution, Washington Post columnist Jason Willick questions whether the attempt to charge fake electors with a crime was worth it.

“The Arizona stumble is a reminder that the legal theory liberals sold themselves to charge the former president was never a slam dunk,” Willick writes.

One quick favor: Republican state lawmakers want Mayes to investigate the City of Phoenix for allegedly violating the state Constitution’s gift clause by giving millions to nonprofits and non-government organizations without the approval of the Phoenix City Council, the Capitol Times’ Jakob Thorington writes.

“It appears to be nothing more than an illegal slush fund for politically favored nonprofits — and that’s exactly what Arizona’s Gift Clause was written to prevent,” Republican state Rep. Walt Blackman said in a news release.

Weed industry still shady: The Arizona Department of Health Services is threatening to revoke licenses from a pair of marijuana testing companies, accusing them of letting moldy weed get into the market, falsely inflating THC levels and nepotistic practices, among other things, per the Republic’s Ray Stern. Testing companies face intense pressure to make their customers — the dispensaries and weed growers — happy, weed industry activist Sam Richard explained.

"If the producers say 'I need this flower to hit 30% THC,' if the numbers keep coming back at 20%, you're going to have a very disappointed customer," Richard said.

ICYMI: We’re offering a Memorial Day discount on a paid subscription all week.

And each day this week, we’re highlighting one news organization in the Phoenix area that we’ve lost (or basically lost) in the last few decades. Today, we’d like to pour one out for one of our favorite now-shuttered blogs — Heat City.

Local journalist Nick R. Martin launched Heat City back in 2009 (after being laid off from the East Valley Tribune) and it quickly earned awards and acclaim. But like so many tiny news organizations, it couldn’t earn enough to survive.

In 2011, Martin moved on to Talking Points Memo covering national politics. These days, he’s back in the indy news game, running The Informant, where he investigates white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other extremists. But The Informant has been on a long hiatus. The news scene and the Valley are worse without it.

So do your part to keep local news alive — upgrade to a paid subscription to support the Agenda this week and get a 25% discount.

When it came time to vote for Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget package, Arizona U.S. Rep. David Schweikert was snoozing.

Or so he says. Democrats are obviously pretty skeptical.

“I had gone 36 hours straight … Went down the hallway to change my shirt and next thing I know I’m holding a cup of coffee and my phone is ringing saying the vote is on. I had fallen asleep. I raced back to the floor,” he told KTAR’s Mike Broomhead.

The bill passed by just one vote. And Schweikert wasn’t the only Republican to “take a nap” during the vote.

Schweikert says he would have voted on the bill — had he stayed awake — and he’ll probably get another chance after the Senate makes its changes and sends the bill back to the House.

“We still have a lot of work to do,” he said.

1. That is, Miami, Arizona, a town in Gila County — not Florida’s party city.