Happy birthday to us!

Lucky number 770 … If rallies could vote … And hold the chile.

Hey readers,

The Arizona Agenda is turning three years old this week! 

Isn’t that wild? We’ve been doing this for 770 emails and counting.

And it’s all because of you.

To every single subscriber reading these words: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 

Your decision to hit that subscribe button is what made this all possible. 

Thank you for allowing us to be part of your routine. Thank you for taking the time to read. Thank you for commenting, liking, sharing, retweeting, forwarding or recommending the Agenda to friends. And of course, a special thank you to those of you who have upgraded to paid subscriptions to support the Agenda. 

We just show up and write this thing — you all are the ones who have made the Agenda a success. 

So this week, we’re celebrating what you’ve created through your support of the Agenda. 

First of all, the Agenda is a pretty cool newsletter. 

💪🏽 We’ve accomplished a lot this year with your help, so we’re gonna take a minute to brag about it. 🏆

It’s also an evolving experiment in journalism. 

🚧 We’ll update you on our most exciting projects and tell you about what else we’re cooking up. 🧪

It’s also something of a beacon of hope for the future of local news.

💸 So we’ll tell you about how the business side is going, including our finances. 📈

And most of all, it’s an amazing community of readers. (That’s you!) 

😎 You all are the best, so we want to hear more from you. 💬

Thankfully, this community is constantly growing. In the last month, we’ve welcomed around 500 new subscribers. (Thanks for signing up, newbies!) 

We told our art intern, ChatGPT, that it takes a village to build the Agenda. Also, we like that new creepy eye logo it put on our barn.

And with all these new faces, we’d like to take a moment to reintroduce ourselves and explain what it is we’re doing here.

The Agenda is an independent newsletter written by two local journalists, Hank Stephenson and Nicole Ludden. Before joining the Agenda, we worked in newsrooms like the Arizona Capitol Times, Arizona Daily Star, Tucson Weekly and Arizona Republic. 

The Agenda launched in 2021 as one of a dozen publications worldwide selected for an advance from Substack as part of its Substack Local project.¹ They gave us a $100,000 “advance” and took almost all of our revenue for the first year in exchange. Now, we pay 10% of our revenue to Substack, like all users of the platform.  

We’re funded almost entirely by our readers, which is a somewhat radical concept in local news these days. We make our money when you click the subscribe button. There’s no billionaire or corporate overlords propping this thing up. Just you. 

We call the Agenda an “insider newsletter for political outsiders” because we nerd out on Arizona politics and government in a way normal people can understand. Basically, we’re your tour guides to the circus of Arizona politics, and the maze of government. 

With your support, we’ve also launched several side-projects, like the Tucson Agenda and Skywolf, our legislation tracking and political intelligence tool. 

But enough about us. Today, we’re celebrating you. 

As the Agenda heads into its fourth year of business, we’re considering new features, new projects and some big, exciting changes to the Agendaverse. 

But first, we want to get your thoughts. 

You are our bosses, after all. 

Can you take three minutes to answer our survey?  

Crossover appeal: Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, drew a huge crowd on Friday in Glendale, where she focused on her record as a prosecutor, and promised to secure the border. Pretty much every Democrat in the state — and a handful of high-profile Republicans — attended the rally, except for one big name who didn’t even get a shout-out: Gov. Katie Hobbs. Hobbs’ snub of the event has politicos speculating whether she was even invited. Meanwhile, Kari Lake’s “Democrats for Lake” event was predictably sad and weird. She trashed Democrats, invited proxies like AZGOP chair Gina Swoboda and Freedom Caucus U.S. Reps. Eli Crane and Andy Biggs, and she announced a bunch of endorsements from Republicans. 

It’s always fraud: Pinal County Supervisor Kevin Cavanaugh alleges there’s “strong evidence that cheating has occurred” in his county’s election after he soundly lost the primary for sheriff, Votebeat Arizona’s Jen Fifield reports. He thinks that because his share of the vote didn’t change much between early ballots and Election-Day ballots, it must be fraud. 

“It’s easy to look at one set of figures, and jump to conclusions,” said Benny White, a Republican election data analyst. “But that’s not necessarily the whole story.”

Off the ballot: The minimum wage proposal for tipped workers won’t be on the ballot, Axios Phoenix’s Jeremy Duda reports. Backers of the measure withdrew the 354,000 signatures they submitted to state officials, a week after a lawsuit from the Arizona Restaurant Association claimed not enough of them were valid. In other ballot news, a judge said the open primaries ballot measure is constitutional, moving the Make Elections Fair Act one step closer to making the November ballot, the Republic’s Mary Jo Pitzl reports. 

Another way to “make elections fair” is to
hire more reporters in this state to keep our
politicians honest. Luckily, you can do that
without a whole court battle.

Water crosses borders, too: Ranchers in Cananea, a town just south of the Arizona border, are blockading roads to stop trucks in an attempt to keep their wells from drying up after a nearby copper mining company started trucking water from the Sonora River, the Arizona Daily Star’s Emily Bregel reports. Meanwhile, Mammoth residents are worried that mining could also dry out their aquifers, Inside Climate News’ Wyatt Myskow reports. 

Orwellian database: U.S. officials are taking DNA samples from asylum seekers, even the ones who are in the country only a few hours before being expelled, the Border Chronicle’s Melissa del Bosque reports. Those saliva samples — 1.5 million since 2020 — are added to the FBI’s criminal investigations database, the Combined DNA Index System. 

Boring is better: The Cochise County supervisors canvassed the primary election results without any incident, the Herald/Review’s Terri Jo Neff reports. And the Santa Cruz County supervisors got chewed out by members of the public at their meeting last week after nearly $40 million went missing from county accounts, the Nogales International’s Angela Gervasi reports. 

“I'm personally happy to see that two of you supervisors are actually getting fired,” Beth Castro (the daughter of former Arizona Gov. Raul Castro) said, referring to the fact that two out of three supervisors were ousted in last week’s primary elections.

Fast and loose: A complaint was filed with the City of Scottsdale alleging the National Association of Realtors didn’t follow campaign finance rules when it backed candidates for Scottsdale mayor and council seats, the Scottsdale Progress’ Tom Scanlon reports. The association didn’t disclose funding for texts, mailers, and other materials, according to Yvonne Cahill, who describes herself as a local real estate consultant and Republican precinct and state committeeman.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s rep as a Midwestern dad got a Southwestern twist when he and Vice President Kamala Harris went to Cocina Adamex in Phoenix. 

The Republic’s Sabine Martin spoke with the owner of Cocina Adamex, Adriana Zapata, who said Walz was cautious when it came time to place their orders (they got green and red chile tamales).

“Both her and the governor were excited,” Zapata said. “The governor didn’t want very spicy food. (Harris) made a joke that even pepper is spicy for him.”

1. Shoutout to our original co-founder Rachel Leingang.