LD21 debate recap

A democratic socialist who is running for a seat in the state House wants to do more than repeal school vouchers and place a moratorium on data centers: she wants to “change the system.”

Miranda Lopez, who won the Democratic primary for one of the two state House seats in Southern Arizona’s Legislative District 21, said in a Sept. 1 interview that she also wants to repeal Arizona’s right to work laws and she wants to fight for trade unions to get better state contracts.

“So those are kind of my top priorities when I am going into the session,” Lopez said.

She’ll have to get elected first, though. Standing in her way is Republican Christopher Kibbey, who’s trying to win one of two House seats up for grabs on Nov. 3.

Kibbey declined an invitation to the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission debates for the district. Early voting begins Oct. 7.

Democratic Rep. Consuelo Hernandez and Sen. Rosanna Gabaldón, both of whom are running for reelection, and Republican Senate candidate Esteban Flores also declined to attend the debate, leaving Lopez to go solo.

Odds are on the side of the Democrats, whose voters outnumber Republican voters by almost 17 percentage points in the district. LD21 runs along the border with Mexico in Pima, Cochise and Santa Cruz counties and includes portions of Tucson and Nogales, Benson, Rio Rico, and Sahuarita.

Below are excerpts of Lopez’ interview with the Tucson Agenda’s senior reporter Joe Ferguson. Her answers have been edited for length and clarity.

How do you advocate for rural portions of your district?

A lot of District 21 is made up of the Cochise and Santa Cruz counties, and there are a lot of issues such as healthcare, infrastructure and education that affect those parts of the district a lot differently than you might see in urban areas. One thing that I would like to commit to, and this kind of depends on not only if (Democrats) can flip the chambers, but also on who we decide as the Democratic Caucus on leadership, but right now there is a rural economic development committee that I would like to be a part of.

I think having a committee specifically designated to address the issues that happen within rural areas, that’s that’s very important and has and would be very significant for advocating for those rural areas.

Voters have expressed concerns about waste, fraud and abuse in both the Arizona public school system and the ESA voucher program in private schools.

Name one specific guardrail you would vote for: a spending restriction, an income cap, an audit requirement, an academic outcome standard, anything. Just give us one idea, if elected, what you would try to put in place.

If I were elected, I would be in favor of completely eliminating the ESA voucher program because to me it’s not enough just to have spending limits or to have a cap for income or even to promise that any unused money will be returned to the state. The entire idea of the voucher program is trying to address the underlying problem, which has plagued the state for decades, which is that Republicans have systematically defunded our education program. … What I would like to do is … completely fund our public education system, so that way the students already have the resources that they need, and they don’t have to be reliant on this per family handout that right now we know is going to mostly wealthy families and is mostly going to pay private tuition at at at schools.

So, what would you say to disability advocates who have long argued that the ESAs are the only way to properly help their children get a proper education, where their children don’t fit into the public school system?

I would say that, just because I want to eliminate the voucher program doesn’t mean that I think that we can’t or shouldn’t be helping students with disabilities.

My idea is that we have an actual school system in place where the families can rely on the public schools because the public schools will have the resources and the staff and the expertise to make sure that those families get the care that they need.

Our next question is about data centers, which has become a contentious issue in Arizona. Do you support Arizona Attorney General Chris Mayes’s call for a moratorium on building and zoning for data centers?

Absolutely. I think that Democrats were able to get this three-year moratorium on tax breaks for data centers, and I do think that that was definitely a good first step. But ultimately, what we need to do is to put a full moratorium in place so that data centers cannot be permitted to build at all until we fully understand what are the actual repercussions of building a bunch of these data centers — not only to evaluate the impact that it would have on our water supply, but also on any pollutants that would be released into the air, the impact of the heat that is released from these data centers, the impact of having these data centers located so close to people because the noise has been known to actually cause a lot of psychological and physical issues.

But when we are talking about these mega data centers that are being built by billionaires and corporations as a way to continue to inflate this AI bubble, those are the types of campuses that I think we need to just ban outright for Arizona.

I’ve worked with countless Democrats over the decades as a reporter. What is the difference between a DSA candidate like yourself and the Democrats I’ve been dealing with for most of my professional career?

I would say the main difference between a DSA candidate and a Democrat that you might be already familiar with is the the ways in which we want to fix the problems that capitalism has created, because there are there are some Democrats, not all Democrats, but there are some Democrats, and a lot of them also tend to be in the more establishment, where they see the issues that capitalism has created and think, “Oh well, let’s just try to fix that one problem,” not necessarily dismantle the system that is causing the problem. And I, as a DSA member, am very much more open to trying to actually change the systems as they work.