New Year's (Legislative) Resolutions

The Tucson Agenda has some thoughts, lawmakers ... Only compromise in odd-numbered years ... And is that a Taco Bell taco?

Our sister ‘sletter, the Tucson Agenda, had some fun yesterday writing New Year’s resolutions for their local elected officials. 

And today, they offered up a few resolutions state lawmakers should stick to for 2024. 

We liked it so much that we wanted to share it with our audience. 

If you want to stay in the know about the view from Southern Arizona, check them out and subscribe!

With New Year’s Day still fresh in our minds and a new session of the state Legislature kicking off on Monday, today is a fitting moment to tell lawmakers what we think their New Year’s resolutions should be.

As reporters, we tend to focus on making sure the public knows what officials are up to. So that’s where we’ll start.

Resolution 1: Be transparent 

• Don’t delete public records. Lawmakers should undo the policy that allows them to delete text messages as soon as they get them and emails after 90 days. GOP lawmakers put that policy in place at the start of last year’s legislative session. It was a giant slap in the face to the public and came shortly after their texts and emails revealed their role in the “audit” of the 2020 election results.

• Make campaign finance deadlines match how people vote. A key deadline for candidates to tell voters who funded their campaigns comes after a ton of people already mailed in their ballots. In Tucson’s primary election last year, nearly half the votes were tallied before candidates told voters who funded the bulk of their campaigns. Switching a few words in state law could do the trick. 

• Let us “See the Money.” While we’re talking about campaign finance, state officials need to do what they promised years ago and build a comprehensive database so the public can easily search for candidates at all levels of government and find out who’s funding them.

Resolution 2: Focus on what matters

• Don’t spend all your time on the culture wars. Lawmakers are introducing bills for the upcoming legislative session and we’re already seeing culture war issues popping up all over the place. Those are debates worth having, to a certain extent. But they tend to take up all the oxygen in the room. On the plus side, one of the state’s most pressing long-term issues, groundwater regulation, is the subject of about two-dozen bills already.

Resolution 3: Don’t balance the state budget on cities’ backs

• Legislators are in charge of the state budget. They should be the ones to fix it. They’re now projecting a shortfall of hundreds of millions of dollars for this fiscal year and the upcoming one. When lawmakers see a deficit, they start looking at cities and counties. After the Great Recession suffocated the economy, they cut funding for all sorts of local things, like roads and schools. Now they’re talking about delaying road projects. Who knows what else they’ll come up with. Local officials aren’t the ones who passed huge tax cuts or installed a $900 million school voucher program. They shouldn’t be the ones forced to fix the deficit.

The funding battle between local governments and the state Legislature will be one of the big debates over the next few months, so get ready to hear a lot about it. 

And remember, you don’t have to sit on the sidelines. Legislators are regular people, same as you. They are often surprisingly accessible and ready to hear from their constituents.

Last year, Gov. Katie Hobbs asked Republican lawmakers to repeal the new universal school voucher law that they had approved under former Gov. Doug Ducey. 

Republicans called the idea “hysterical.”

This year, Hobbs is taking a more conservative approach. 

She announced a plan yesterday to add oversight and accountability to the massive and growing program. And it doesn’t involve repealing or defunding the Empowerment Scholarship Account program, despite the state’s budget woes. 

Arizona House Speaker Ben Toma wasn’t a fan.

And so begins this year’s battle over Arizona’s universal school voucher program, a first-of-its-kind experiment allowing any student to attend a private or religious school on the state’s dime. 

Of course, many of Hobbs’ proposals — like requiring students to attend public schools before receiving a voucher — are simply never going to fly with Republican lawmakers, who fought long and hard for a “universal” voucher program. 

But other provisions — like requiring private schools that receive state dollars to fingerprint their teachers and provide accommodations and services for students with disabilities — are really the minimum the state could do. 

There are a few Republicans who might be open to those bare-bones regulations, including Republican Sen. Ken Bennett. 

And technically, it only takes a few Republican votes to pass legislation with Democrats’ help. But in reality, the flow of legislation through the Capitol is controlled by a few key Republican lawmakers, including Toma, who is running for Congress in a crowded Republican primary. 

As Arizona’s school voucher program takes off, lawmakers need to be vigilant to protect students, teachers and taxpayers. That means constantly evaluating and, yes, adding some red tape to the nearly billion-dollar program. 

But don’t hold your breath for some grand, commonsense compromise on ESAs. 2024 is an election year, after all.

Going to Rocky Point, BRB: The Lukeville border crossing connecting Arizona and Puerto Peñasco, Sonora, will reopen tomorrow, U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced in a statement yesterday, a month after it shuttered the critical crossing. The Morley pedestrian gate in Nogales will also reopen, more than a month after planned, CBP said. Arizona politicians of all stripes agreed it should have never been shut down to begin with. Meanwhile, a Tempe man was ambushed and shot while traveling home from Rocky Point on the alternative route through Sassabe and some of the harrier parts of Sonora, AZFamily reported. 

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If you subscribe today, we still won’t get to take a Rocky Point vacation until after the election. And by then, we’re really gonna need a margarita!

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It’s a tough job: Gov. Katie Hobbs’ first year in office was marked by “growing pains,” a “lack of clarity” about her policy priorities and a mid-year staff shakeup that seemed to steady the ship. But the real test of her ability to navigate divided state government will come this year, through budget cuts and a contentious election cycle, the Republic’s Stacey Barchenger writes. 

 "She's made some mistakes, but we all do, that's a given," voter James Eddlemon, a 65-year-old helicopter mechanic from Kingman, told Barchenger.

How hot can you handle?: Arizona author Tom Zoellner penned a guest opinion for the New York Times pushing back on this summer’s national media narrative that Arizona is becoming a climate-change wasteland, saying he sees it not as a “hellscape” but rather, as “an opportunity for centuries of climate ingenuity and adaptation to be put to good use.”

“(T)he question is not when will this region become unlivable. It is: Are we willing to make certain adjustments to live on a new hotter and drier frontier?” Zoellner writes.

Suing the bible: Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes released his final version of the “elections procedures manual” — AKA the state’s “elections bible” — over the weekend, and Republicans, including Senate President Warren Petersen, House Speaker Ben Toma and AZGOP Chair Jeff DeWit, all promptly promised to sue, KJZZ’s Wayne Schutsky reports. The looming legal battle over the manual and criminal investigation of Cochise County supervisors ought to settle some unresolved questions before the 2024 election, Votebeat’s Jen Fifield writes in a roundup of the trends and stories they’re keeping an eye on as they prepare for another year of election-denying tomfoolery.

Moving up: San Luis City Councilwoman Gloria Torres, who was convicted of misdemeanor ballot abuse last year for delivering other people’s ballots, got a promotion to vice mayor last month, the Arizona Daily Independent reports. Part of her plea agreement states that she cannot run for office after her term expires at the end of 2024, KYMA previously reported.

Thanks, David Gowan: Thanks in part to all the fireworks that lawmakers have increasingly made legal in the desert, the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality says New Year’s weekend brought “some of the worst air quality we’ve ever seen in the valley,” KJZZ’s Jill Ryan reports.

The Arizona Senate announced yesterday that it was changing the name of Republican Sen. David Farnsworth’s “Transportation and Technology Committee” to the “Transportation, Technology and Missing Children Committee.”

Why is that funny, you ask?

Well, you gotta know the backstory. 

And sticking with today’s Tucson theme, this is how Tucsonans celebrated the New Year, which is both funny and objectively offensive.¹

1. We’re big Taco Bell fans, but given that it’s darn near impossible to find a Taco Bell in that town anyway, we’re hoping El Guero Canelo or BK Tacos will sponsor next year’s taco drop.