Earlier this year, we wrote about how Republican lawmakers were sponsoring a bunch of bills that would strengthen Arizona’s public records laws.
Yeah, it was a weird moment for us, too.
But the rash of bills actually made sense in context — as we wrote at the time:
“(I)t’s clear that many of these bills are self-serving: As their grip on state government has slipped in recent years, Republicans now want to investigate schools, county officials and Democratic statewide officeholders (or in some cases, moderate Republican officials). And they’re running into the same problems accessing public records that we journalists hit.”
Plus, it’s not like Republicans were gazing inward and fixing the host of transparency issues that plague the halls of the Capitol — from secretive “closed caucus” meetings that fly in the face of Arizona’s open meetings laws1 to the absurdly brief records retention schedule that lawmakers adopted in order to more quickly destroy their emails and other communications.
But despite their sketchy motives and willful blind spots, some of these ideas were legitimately good public records policy.
For example:
Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman sponsored Senate Bill 1437 to require government entities to provide copies of records “in the least expensive manner possible.”
Republican Rep. Michael Way filed House Bill 2139, which would require government bodies to respond to records requests within 15 business days.
Republican Sen. T.J. Shope sponsored SB1340, which would effectively encourage more public records to be kept electronically, moving government agencies further into the digital age and making records easier to find.
Unfortunately, only one of those three bills even got a hearing.
Anyway, long story short: That got us thinking — how did our lawmakers vote on public records and transparency bills this year?
So we used Skywolf to make a scorecard!
Introducing the Skywolf scorecard
We’ve been working on this new scorecard feature in Skywolf, our legislative intelligence software, for a while. We’re getting ready to release it to Skywolf subscribers in the coming days so that users can easily measure which lawmakers voted for or against their priorities. But you readers are getting a sneak peek.
To build the scorecard, we did a simple search in Skywolf for the bills that the Arizona Media Association had signed in for or against. The AMA represents a ton of local news organizations2 and keeps an eye on bills at the Capitol that would affect our industry.
The AMA used the Legislature’s Request to Speak system to weigh in on seven bills this year — five that they ultimately supported and three that they initially opposed. (The AMA changed its opinion on one bill from opposed to supportive after lawmakers adopted an amendment.)
We added those bills to our scorecard, then we searched through a bunch of other bills that we’ve written about this year and added a few more — including the bill to create monuments to both Charlie Kirk and assassinated journalist Don Bolles. Because some of the best and worst bills dealing with public records, transparency and the media never got a hearing, we culled it down to just eight bills.
When we ran the results, something unexpected happened.
Republicans dominated our pro-transparency scorecard
For many reasons, we didn’t expect Republicans to do well on the scorecard.
But in hindsight, it makes sense that many Democrats bombed this test.
You see, Democrats are far more beholden to cities — and the powerful organization that represents cities and towns at the Capitol, the League of Arizona Cities and Towns — than Republicans are.
And because cities have to deal with a lot of public records requests, they’re often the prime blocker of more open public records policies.
For example, when SB1437 — Hoffman’s bill to limit the costs of public records — first came up for a vote, all the Democrats on the Senate Government Committee supported it.
But by the time the bill made it to the Senate floor, those same Democrats voted against it. None explained why they switched their vote.
As the bill moved to the House, Democrats started piping up.
“The City of Tucson, the League of Cities, and the Association of Counties are all in opposition of this bill,” Democratic Rep. Stephanie Stahl Hamilton said while explaining her vote against it.
She noted that cities charge for staff time to review, compile and redact records, and the bill would prohibit that, which cities don’t like.
“We’re already very limited in what we can charge for copies,” she said. “And then the second point is this will remove any economic disincentive for filing frivolous, duplicative, and overly broad requests.”
Republican Rep. Lisa Fink noted that the taxpayers already paid for any salaries associated with fulfilling records requests, so cities are essentially charging the taxpayer twice to deliver records.
Dems protected the media industry
Democrats didn’t vote against every transparency bill — mostly just those that butted up against the wishes of cities.
And in some cases, Democrats were lockstep in support of the press corps — or anyone else who talks smack on the internet — including on a strike-everything amendment to SB1099, which would have made it easier to sue people for defamation.
Several Republicans argued in favor of the bill by saying they’ve been the “victim” of lies on the internet. And it passed the Senate on a party-line vote before dying in the House with only eight supporters. All House Democrats and even most House Republicans opposed it.
Still, Democrats didn’t stand up and deliver impassioned speeches against the bill like Republican Rep. Alexander Kolodin did.
“(Supporting the bill) is treason to the flag, treason to the country, and treason to the Constitution. I vote hell no and hope to never see anything this bad on the board ever again in my life. Hell no,” Kolodin said.
Plus, Democrats scored points for supporting the media’s agenda when it came to public notice laws.
Public notices have been a big fight for the newspapers for decades. Essentially, citizens and cities are required to post (and pay for) “public notices” in newspapers when certain things happen — like when a person starts a business or a city attempts to amend its charter.
SB1167 attempted to decrease the number of public notices that must be printed in newspapers.3
Republicans argue it’s a wasteful and unnecessary requirement, and government websites could just post the notices for free. Newspapers argue that public notice requirements keep that vital public information in the hands of an independent organization and ensures accountability.
But public notices are also a big revenue stream for some newspapers, as Democratic Sen. Lauren Kuby noted.
“Yeah, these independent newspapers may rely on these fees that they get from cities,” she said while explaining her vote. “We have very little coverage of city news these days. We see Gannett gobbling up the news chains. We see newspapers closing down every day. And I don’t think the Arizona Republic even has a beat reporter that’s focused on, say, the city of Tempe. They have to cover a lot of jurisdictions. So (let’s not) weaken this funding source for local journalism.”
Check your lawmaker’s score
Curious how your lawmakers scored? Check out the full scorecard here.
And speaking of public records, we asked you last week to try out our new public records request system and help load intern George up with ideas. And you all came through with some great records requests.
Keep them coming by filling out this form.
Weighing in: Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes sided with the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors in an elections dispute with Recorder Justin Heap, the Republic’s Ronald J. Hansen reports. The supervisors signed off on using ballot drop boxes, but Heap says his office selects early voting locations and anyone who collects ballots from the drop boxes would be guilty of ballot harvesting. Mayes says the supervisors are following the law and drop boxes are not legally considered early voting locations.
“Indeed, if Recorder Heap’s counsel were correct, every mailbox in the state would be an early voting location, and every mail carrier could be accused of illegally harvesting ballots,” Mayes wrote.
From Burning Man to the courtroom: Local music producer Michael Von Gold sued the brother of Arizona attorney general candidate Rodney Glassman after a business deal went south, per the New Times’ Stephen Lemons. Von Gold and Jeremy Glassman had a drug-fueled falling out at the 2022 Burning Man festival, where Von Gold also says Glassman made salacious (and unproven) allegations about his brother Rodney that made headlines last week.
Calling bullshit: Despite publicly available data showing overcrowding at an immigration holding facility in Mesa, a Department of Homeland Security official claimed two Democratic members of Congress were wrong when they highlighted the overcrowding, the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy reports. As MacDonald-Evoy previously reported, one of the few times the facility wasn’t overcrowded was when U.S. Reps. Yassamin Ansari and Greg Stanton visited the facility in February, after giving ICE a week-long heads-up about the visit.
Betting on savings: One of the school voucher reform measures that might make it onto the November ballot would require education officials to do more tasks, without providing more funding, which critics say violates a state constitutional requirement for ballot measures to identify a funding source, Mary Jo Pitzl reports for Capitol Media Services. A spokesman for Fortify AZ, which is backing the measure, says the state will save money if the measure is approved, which means there doesn’t need to be an identified funding source. A competing measure from public school advocates would transfer $1.75 million from the medical marijuana fund to cover costs.
Collateral damage: After a scandal erupted over two teachers allegedly having a sexual relationship with a student, Centennial High School principal Scott Hollabaugh said he is leaving at the end of the school year, Rey Covarrubias Jr reports for the Republic. Peoria police referred the allegations to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, but no charges have been filed yet. The scandal is lighting a fire on social media, partly because one of the teachers accused of having the improper sexual relationship with a student is the sister of two TikTok influencers.
Even the QAnon Shaman thinks the Trump administration went too far with its $1.776 billion slush fund for January 6 rioters.
Jacob Angeli-Chansley, the Arizona man who wore a horned fur headdress as he paraded through the Capitol building and ended up spending two years in federal prison, said he wouldn’t take any of that “blood money,” Katie O’Shaughnessy, Hayli Griffin and Marcus Reichley report for Cronkite News.
President Donald Trump’s deal with the IRS, an agency he oversees, also includes an assurance that the IRS won’t audit him, his family or any of his businesses.
“You think I’m gonna take a f—ing dime from Trump and the government after he’s using this thing to cover him and his family in perpetuity for all of their crimes?” he told Cronkite News. “You think I’m gonna take a dime of that blood money?”
We’ve never imagined we’d say this, but props to the horn-wearing insurrectionist.
1 Those closed caucus meetings don’t break the letter of the law because lawmakers gave themselves a carveout in the open meetings law.
2 We’re dues-paying members of the AMA.
3 An amendment later removed the hit SB1167 would deliver to newspapers, and the AMA supported the bill. You’ll notice it’s listed twice in our scorecard — supporting the original Senate version counts against lawmakers, while supporting the amended House version counts in their favor.