Lawmakers on break, taxpayers on hold

The slush fund summer … Take our jobs, please … And we donated one prayer.

Arizona’s lawmakers haven’t done much work in the past month.

Legislators have sporadically come to the Capitol for one-day workweeks since the House and Senate announced different vacation schedules on May 7 as they take time to hammer out a budget.

And by “they,” we mean the few legislative leaders and fiscal hawks who actually get a say in what goes into the state’s massive spending plan for the next year.

Yesterday, House members met to vote on a few remaining bills and adjourned until June 16. We’re hearing that’s the week when we’ll start to see some budget action.

There are about three weeks left to get a state budget passed, and the real deadline is likely sooner than the usual July 1 cutoff. Republican Rep. Matt Gress has to leave by June 22 for his wedding in Italy, and he’s taking some House members with him.

Despite his upcoming nuptials, Gress has the budget, not love, on the brain.

“It would be a nice wedding gift to get the budget done before I leave to go get married,” he told us.

Republican Sen. John Kavanagh, who chairs the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, told us he and a few other lawmakers and senior staff members are driving to the Capitol three to four times a week to negotiate with Gov. Katie Hobbs’ staff.

Senators might meet one day next week so they don’t “forget how to come here,” he said, but he’s hoping to get to an agreement with Hobbs’ staff early next week.

Kavanagh said there aren’t any revelatory specifics in those budget talks. Reeling in the school voucher program is a nonstarter for Republicans, and Democrats have their own “sacred cows,” like opposing internal immigration enforcement, he said.

The senator is sticking to his plan to allocate $90 million each to the governor, Senate Republicans and House Republicans. That’s part of the slush fund budgeting lawmakers have leaned on since Hobbs took office, and often includes letting lawmakers fund projects they want so they’ll approve the budget. House Republicans, however, aren’t on board.

Gress previously told Capitol Media Services’ Bob Christie that “the 90-90-90 plan” doesn’t make sense for more standard items that go into the governor’s budget, like raises for state troopers and fixing school buildings. Kavanagh said requests from legislative Democrats would be grouped into Hobbs’ $90 million, and “invariably, the governor winds up getting more (money).”

While lawmakers like Gress and Kavanagh play an active role in budget talks, at least most of the state’s Legislators are rested from weeks of vacation days.

So what have lawmakers been doing while collecting their (admittedly meager) paychecks on your tax dollars? We’re so glad you asked.

Nicole and new Agenda editorial intern Alysa Horton spent the day chasing lawmakers around the state Capitol, attempting to get to the bottom of what exactly your lawmakers have been up to this whole time.

Our art intern, ChatGPT, didn’t get to go but they imagine it looked kinda like this.

Kavanagh told us he’s been installing pavers in his backyard, “which is horrible, which is why I want more budget meetings.”

Democratic Rep. Janeen Connolly also caught up on yard work. Connolly hasn’t been able to keep up with her garden since she launched her campaign last year, so she bought a bunch of flowers and planted them throughout the past few weeks.

Most lawmakers told us they’ve been busy with their careers outside the Capitol.

Democratic Rep. Kevin Volk, who wrote an op-ed criticizing lawmakers for taking time off without a budget deal in the bag, said he’s working at his real estate gig and already prepping bills for next year. But he still isn’t sure if he’ll renew his legislation to make "howdy" the state slogan.

Republican Rep. Jeff Weninger has been busy running his sandwich shop chain and celebrating his daughter’s high school graduation. And Republican Rep. Nick Kupper is trying to find more side gigs because he lost his paralegal job when he became a lawmaker. He has four kids to take care of, including one who also graduated from high school during the break. And being a former American Ninja Warrior contestant doesn’t pay the bills.

Other legislative leaders, like Republican Rep. Leo Biasiucci and Senate President Warren Petersen, have kept up the politicking. They went to D.C. to ask for the Department of the Interior’s help in Colorado River negotiations.

The duo also took a trip to the Arizona Biltmore last Saturday to promote Republican U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs’ gubernatorial campaign at a Turning Point rally. In fact, a lot of legislative Republicans did. Especially the far-right ones.

Rep. David Marshall gave the opening prayer, and Freedom Caucus Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman riled up the crowd. Rep. Alexander Kolodin, who’s running for Secretary of State next year, told attendees, “victory depends on patriots like (them).”

Democrats also kept up the politics. And junkets.

Democratic Sen. Analise Ortiz and five other lawmakers went to Brazil to learn about the country’s abortion bans. Ortiz said in a press release that she went on the trip with the State Innovation Exchange, which works closely with progressive state lawmakers and advocacy groups. The group took Democratic lawmakers to Georgia last year.

Ortiz said in Brazil, the “abortion pill is treated like contraband,” and the country’s conditions are “the future that far-right extremist politicians in the United States want for us.”

@senanaliseortizI’ve had the experience of a lifetime to go to Brazil with the State Innovation Exchange and the Women’s Equality Center to study abortion restrictions in Brazil and to meet the women leading the movement to achieve reproductive freedom for all. Stay tuned for part 2 and much more content!

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The Agenda is very excited to announce we’ve brought on two summer interns!

Please help us welcome them.

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Katherine Cohen

Our new business intern, Katherine, will focus on number crunching, keyboard click-clacking and starting new projects to better connect our readers with the information they want to know. Much like the rest of us in the Agendaverse, Katherine is a politics junkie, studying political science and French at ASU. She has experience in PR and communications, including with Noble Predictive Insights, has worked on numerous campaigns and been part of a local climate coalition.

Katherine was born and raised in Washington, D.C., and moved to Arizona for high school. She spent a couple of years living in Los Angeles and gallivanting around the world, but eventually made her way back to the dry heat.

When she gets to step away from work and the political realm, Katherine becomes *record scratch* the ketaminecowboy — a professional DJ. Katherine regularly immerses herself in the house music scene, whether at raves or in L.A. — her second favorite spot after the Arizona Capitol.

“I found Arizona Agenda through my family, who are all subscribers. I’ve always been really interested in the intersection of politics, writing, and business … This internship felt like the perfect next step to dig deeper into the journalism side of politics.”

Alysa Horton

Please also welcome our new editorial intern, Alysa. She will write short-form newsletter bits, longer stories, craft intern introductions (like these words you’re reading now!) and anything else thrown her way — as long as it’s not math or business related. Alysa graduated in May with her bachelor’s degree in journalism from ASU, but is fearful of entering the job market at 21 years old, so she will start her master’s degree in August.

As an *almost* Arizona native, Alysa is well-versed in the state’s political scene. She was the editor-in-chief of the State Press, a digital production intern for the Republic, an editorial intern for Arizona Foothills Magazine, a politics reporter for Cronkite News and always an avid Agenda reader.

Outside of politics and working, Alysa is just a girl. She loves Taylor Swift, an iced latte, the Housewives franchises and traveling. Her most recent venture was to Cuba, where she studied media and society with the Cronkite School.

“I found the Arizona Agenda through my dad, who has been a consistent reader for years. Hi Dad! Because of my family’s ongoing love for the Agenda, I approached Hank and Nicole at a luncheon event a few months ago where, despite totally fangirling, they thought I had potential.”

Special session?: The looming federal budget cuts could force lawmakers to revise the state budget that they still haven’t written, Axios’ Jeremy Duda notes. We’re hoping that means lawmakers come back to the Capitol this fall for a special session. Also notable from Duda’s report — Republican Sen. J.D. Mesnard is still holding out hope that they can vote this year on the Prop 123 / school voucher plan that he and other Republicans have been pushing.

Her whole career was a charade: Former Republican state Sen. Justine Wadsack’s $8 million lawsuit against the City of Tucson alleging Tucson Police targeted her because of her political views by issuing her a speeding ticket while she was driving 71 mph in a 35 mph zone is a “political charade,” lawyers for Tucson argued in court Tuesday, per the Tucson Sentinel’s Dylan Smith.

“Wadsack makes nearly a dozen claims about ‘leaks’ in the suit, including that a police report and body-cam video were ‘leaked’ to the press. The Sentinel's reporting was based on records — including the written reports and video — that were released by TPD in response to a formal public records request, as the original story explained,” Smith wrote. “Despite the claims of a conspiracy to ‘leak’ information, this reporter — who had the sole byline on the original news report — has to the best of my knowledge never met nor interacted with any of the named defendants in the case.”

Extremism: Republican U.S. Rep. Eli Crane of Northern Arizona’s Congressional District 2 introduced legislation to defund the National Endowment for Democracy, which supports pro-democracy groups around the world, and which Crane says is “a key contributor to global censorship campaigns, domestic propaganda, and regime change politics,” the Verde Independent’s Tony Capobianco writes. Meanwhile, Democratic U.S. Rep. Yassamin Ansari announced her extreme heat legislative agenda, which includes a trio of bills dealing with urban heat mitigation, emergency preparedness and studying the economic impact of extreme heat. Finally Democratic U.S. Rep. Greg Stanton launched a new “extreme heat” caucus in Congress, per KJZZ’s Katherine Davis-Young.

The eggs are too damn high: A Tucson restaurateur sued the Department of Agriculture over a 2022 rule requiring egg-laying hens to be cage free. But the department never enforced those rules and now it’s reworking the whole plan and asking a judge to delay a decision until it comes up with the new rules, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer reports. The cage free hen fight, which we wrote about in 2022, and associated lawsuit are wrapped up in whether the department had the authority to enact those rules in the first place — but the whole fight is kinda irrelevant considering chickens are dying like crazy from the avian flu.

For the price of 12 eggs, you can support a whole month’s worth of Agenda newsletters.

Don’t look up: Fresh out of actual airplanes to track, the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy turns his attention to “high-altitude surveillance balloons” that the Army and a private company have hovering above Tucson and Sierra Vista. The spy balloons are triggering obvious questions like: What data are they collecting and why?

“It is a technology that should not and constitutionally cannot be applied to the American people,” Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, told MacDonald-Evoy. “Even testing for eventual overseas use in legitimate combat theaters raises a lot of questions about what kind of data is being collected.”

Just rip out the signs: Phoenix City Councilwoman Laura Pastor defended her vote to continue studying, rather than eliminating Phoenix’s dangerous and generally annoying “reverse lanes” on 7th Avenue and 7th Street. In an oped in the Republic, she wrote that she also dislikes the lanes, but Phoenix needs a thoughtful plan to eliminate them.

“I understand the frustration that this choice has caused,” she wrote. “In recent weeks, some activists have taken to social media to criticize me, even going as far as to threaten a recall election.”

Power surge: The cost of energy in Arizona could surge by 13% thanks to President Donald Trump’s big beautiful budget bill, which would abruptly end green energy tax credits, according to green energy industry studies, the New York Times writes.

Family dollar-fifty: Family Dollar, which has about 150 locations in Arizona, agreed to pay a $300,000 fine after Attorney General Kris Mayes launched a consumer fraud investigation into the company for changing prices at the register, but not on its shelves, the Republic’s Russ Wiles writes.

If you want to chip in for former one-term Republican state Sen. Justine Wadsack’s ill-conceived lawsuit against Tucson police — good news!

She really needs your money.

Her online panhandling efforts have only netted $1,035 (and four prayers) towards her goal of $75,000.