Republican and Democratic candidates in a Tucson legislative district split sharply on school vouchers and data centers in debates on Sept. 3.
The state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program, or school vouchers, has been a contentious issue since 2022, when Arizona became the first state in the nation to offer vouchers to any student to attend private and religious schools with public funding. And it was among the most contentious issues at the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission debate.
The Democratic slate of Reps. Nancy Gutierrez, Chris Mathis and Sen. Priya Sundareshan wants to downsize the program and add stricter academic and financial controls and income caps.
Republican candidates Bob Dohse and Doug Everett want to maintain the program’s scale, but add oversight and staff to prevent fraud, waste and abuse.
Mathis said he wants to repeal universal vouchers and return to offering vouchers to only certain student populations, such as military families, those with special needs and those in failing schools. He noted that enrollment in the program and associated costs have soared to 104,000 students presently and an estimated $1.2 billion next year.
“We are using public dollars to pay for a billion bucks’ worth every year of private education,” Mathis said.
Voters in Legislative District 18, which sits entirely within Pima County and includes much of Tucson between Country Club and Camino Seco roads north of Broadway, will go to the polls Nov. 3. Early ballots go out Oct. 7.
Legislative District 18
Gutierrez, the assistant House Democratic leader, and Mathis are running for reelection. Dohse is the lone Republican running for the district’s two seats in the House.
Sundareshan, the Senate Democratic leader, is facing a challenge from Everett in her reelection bid.
Dohse and Everett said they believe the voucher program is a major component of parental choice in education.
“They allow the parents the choice of directing a portion of the cost of educating their child in public school to the school they think is best for their child, and that includes the private schools and homeschooling and the micro schools,” Everett said.
An equally contentious topic at the debate was data centers, which enable cloud computing and storage and advanced automation such as artificial intelligence, smart technology and robotics. But they require a lot of land, water and power, and they cause noise pollution, sparking communities around the nation to resist building them.
Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, has called for a temporary pause on approving new data centers until Arizona develops a statewide understanding and plan for data-center use. The Legislature came to a bipartisan decision this year to impose a three-year moratorium on tax incentives to build them.
The Democratic candidates agreed with Mayes.
“I absolutely support Attorney General Kris Mayes’ call for a moratorium, a temporary moratorium, on data centers until we have a statewide plan on the resource use,” Sundareshan said. “I think the key there again is it's a temporary moratorium. It’s not an outright ban.”
Dohse and Everett argued against a statewide moratorium. Dohse said the state should not override local control, while Everett said a pause gives the appearance the state doesn’t want data centers.
“But if we don’t want them, we might as well end the debate now because this Zoom debate’s made possible by a data center,” Everett said. “So in general, they’re good for Arizona like this debate is good for the voters to become informed, and we could not have had this debate 20 years ago because there wasn’t enough bandwidth, and data centers make the debate possible.”
There were areas of agreement among the candidates, such as that whoever gets elected should push for Tucson’s interests over the interests of Maricopa County.
“Well, I call it the Kingdom of Maricopa,” Dohse said.
Gutierrez and Mathis said it is important for Southern Arizona lawmakers to stick together because they get results when they do.
Gutierrez said Democrats were adamant during budget negotiations that allocations had to be statewide.
“When we talked about funding for affordable housing, that funding had to go all over the state, not just to stay in Maricopa,” she said.