Phoenix metro residents who make their electric or water bill payments out to the Salt River Project — widely recognized as SRP — are also funding a PAC working to elect a strange (mostly Republican) coterie of candidates.
That list includes Republican Congressmen Eli Crane and Juan Ciscomani, a Democratic candidate for governor in New Mexico and allegedly prolific dick-pic-sender Mark Lamb.1
SRP’s PAC — called its Political Involvement Committee — sent at least $500,000 in donations to candidates and other PACs. Those contributions are funded with money taken out of the paychecks of employees who opted in. Some of those donations are even to congressional and senatorial races in California, Colorado, Idaho, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Utah.
But that’s not even the controversy.
As a report released Friday by watchdog researchers at the Energy and Policy Institute noted, SRP spends another half-million running its PAC — and that’s all directly funded by SRP customers’ bill payments.
Plenty of questions remain unanswered about what the PAC is really up to — and, for that matter, who’s even in charge, since the roster of 11 employees who run it isn’t publicly disclosed.
In its report, the Energy and Policy Institute noted that it requested records about the PAC’s budget from previous years. The response noted that the PAC didn’t even have an administrative budget until 2023.
But the little information that can be gleaned from its three recent administrative budgets only sketch the committee’s activities in the broadest terms. They include vague line items, like “professional development,” which made up the entirety of the $500,000 budget in 2023 and 2024.
But in 2025, when the committee started creating a budget above a pre-K level of comprehension, $240,000 was allocated for “external meals.” That’s about half of the year’s budget.
The PAC’s administrative budget, all funded by ratepayers.
So whether you like it or not, your electric bill payments are going toward a ton of meals for the mysterious, politically connected SRP employees picking where they’ll throw their money — and perhaps sleazily picking up some political clout along the way.
The organization called the PAC “an essential part” of SRP’s public affairs strategy.
“Political engagement through PIC is an important supplement to SRP’s public affairs efforts as it helps policymakers understand water and power issues, and the impact to our customers and communities,” Jennifer Schuricht, the utility’s senior manager for public and media relations, said.
But officials are questioning the choices of the PAC and, especially, why its operations are so shrouded in darkness. Democratic Sen. Lauren Kuby — who recently crushed a primary opponent financially backed by a powerful energy utility — called for an end to the funding channel.
John Travise, who serves on the SRP Association Board, said he’s been surprised at the modus operandi at the quasi-public utility since he took office earlier this year. He sees the PAC as “basically open corruption.”
“It’s a slush fund for them, 100%. They buy politicians with it — they like to play kingmakers,” Travise told us. “They donate all over the place, so you can’t say they’re ideologically captured. But it’s ratepayer money at the end of the day, and that’s what irks me.”
The report comes as a new crew of SRP elected officials is trying to upend the status quo at the utility. In April, several fresh candidates won election to positions on the two councils that make up SRP’s governing board, even as Turning Point USA poured money and resources into right-leaning candidates in the races.
A pro-clean energy majority took office — but the members in its ranks don’t necessarily see themselves as renewable zealots. Rather, they characterize themselves as outsiders looking to shake up the status quo at SRP.
(And anyway, the environmental majority is no longer — the board appointed Maricopa County Supervisor Thomas Galvin as a replacement for Nick Brown, the clean energy advocate who resigned.)
From the inside, the new board members describe an environment dominated by the utility’s staff — unelected employees — who have long controlled day-to-day operations and planned key decisions. Previous board members, the newcomers said, have tacitly gone along with the staff’s ideas.
But that’s changing, they noted.
“There’s a history of not really having debates about issues — that’s why there was a freak out about us,” a newly elected board member told us. “It’s not just that we have a different view on energy, but also that we want to have debates about some of these things.”
Consider a debate over the SRP Political Involvement Committee one such thing.
And the newcomers have their eyes fixed on a number of larger issues, too. The newer officials are talking about big picture ideas like reforming the SRP elections so that non-landowners get a say, as well as creating a docket system modeled after the Arizona Corporation Commission’s that would make it easier for the public to understand what’s influencing the board.
This isn’t the first time Arizona utilities have come under fire for spending money to influence elections. Arizona Public Service — the state’s largest utility, better known as APS — donated more than $3 million to dark money groups in 2014 to try to sway Arizona Corporation Commission elections for its favored candidates. The two candidates the money supported won, and two years later, the commission opened an investigation.
“This is a regulated monopoly, and it’s the responsibility of the commission to oversee their activities and to make sure there’s complete transparency in their actions,” then-Arizona Corporation Commissioner Bob Burns said at the time.
Years later, documents revealed that APS actually funneled upwards of $10 million through standard and dark money channels to groups supporting ACC candidates.
Unlike APS, SRP isn’t regulated by the Corporation Commission. Still, it’s a semi-public monopoly, and the fact that it uses ratepayer money for its political efforts is raising alarm within the boards and among lawmakers.
And, perhaps even more concerning is that it isn’t clear who’s getting the cushy perks of doling out SRP’s political dollars.
“That’s the thing,” Travise said, “I don’t understand who makes these decisions.”
All SRP told us is that 11 employees sit on the PAC’s advisory committee and approve or deny each contribution, per Schuricht.
But that poses another question: who proposes each contribution?
We haven’t received an answer on that yet. It seems that, like an onion, the layers of SRP’s mysterious PAC will need to be peeled away little by little.
Congressional debates start this week.
The Agenda team is already in the thick of holding head-to-heads with candidates for the Legislature as part of the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission’s 2026 debates program.
This week, Clean Elections is kicking off its series of debates for Arizona’s congressional candidates, though the RSVP list is still a little light on incumbents.
Today
Tune in at 4 p.m. for the CD3 debate with Alan Aversa (No Labels) and David Redkey (Green). Democratic Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari didn’t respond to the invite.
Wednesday
Tune in at 4 p.m. for the CD5 debate with Democrat Elizabeth Lee. GOP nominee Mark Lamb declined to debate.
And at 6 p.m., we’ve got the CD7 debate between Democrat Adelita Grijalva and Republican Daniel Butierez. Yes, they’ll both be there!
Thursday
At 4 p.m., you can catch Bernadette Greene-Placentia making her case to voters in CD8. GOP Congressman Abe Hamadeh hasn’t RSVP’d.
And at 6 p.m., Democratic candidate Danielle “Dani” Sterbinsky will make her case for why voters in CD9 should elect her over Paul Gosar, who hasn’t responded to his invite.
For the full debates schedule, check Clean Elections’ website.
They’re not wrong: “Now that time has come,” “the chickens have come home to roost,” “threatening to shut down the Southwest.” For more semi-apocalyptic (and pretty accurate) framing, check out the New York Times story about the new deal for Colorado River water. The dust is still settling on the deal, but it’s clear Arizona is going to get hit harder — roughly one-third of the state’s share of river water is getting cut for the next two years — than any other state that depends on the river. The Times’ Arizona reporter Reis Thebault traces the impact of the cuts from the Central Arizona Project offices in Phoenix to worried officials in Cave Creek, which gets 95% of its water from the river.
Politicians helping politicians: Attorney General Kris Mayes won’t prosecute Gov. Katie Hobbs over the scandal involving Sunshine Residential Homes, a contractor that made big donations to Hobbs and then swayed state officials to pay more for group home contracts, Mayes announced Friday. The summary of the AG’s Office findings noted that an actual quid pro quo is incredibly difficult to prove, but the investigation unearthed a few new details, per the Republic’s Stacey Barchenger, who first reported on the shadiness last year, forcing the AG’s investigation. Those new details include that Sunshine Residential gave an additional $150,000 to the governor’s legal defense fund, that Hobbs’ campaign manager Nicole DeMont solicited $50,000 from the company every three months and that Hobbs, her husband and DeMont went to dinner at Sunshine CEO Simon Kottoor’s Scottsdale mansion before Sunshine Residential got its big contract bump.
Birds of a feather: As cities across the state and the nation start rethinking their contracts with mass-surveillance tool Flock, one Arizona town is going the opposite direction — Flocks on (almost) every corner. The 7,000-person, 1.5-square-mile town of Youngtown in the northwest Valley has 400 Flocks, and Mayor Michael LaVault is a big fan, despite the history of police abusing the system to stalk women, KJZZ’s Taylor Griffith reports. Meanwhile, on the Navajo Nation, Flocks are popping up without much public explanation, and many people think they’re just speed cameras. They don’t catch speeders, and local officials largely didn’t respond to inquiries from the Republic’s Arlyssa D. Becenti about whether the public is being adequately informed.
“Let’s fix the abuse, make sure it doesn’t happen again and you know, move on with the system that’s working very well,” LaVault said.
This is why we can’t have nice schools: Half of the school board seats in Maricopa County are uncontested, so the races will be canceled in the November election, the Republic’s Alexandra Hardle reports. In 31 districts across the Valley, there aren’t enough contenders to constitute a “race” and the election will simply be called off and winners announced. And several other school districts don’t even have as many candidates as open seats, leaving Maricopa County Schools Superintendent Shelli Boggs to simply pick school board members for them. Boggs is a MAGA acolyte who, as we previously noted, is using her power of appointment to remake local school boards in her image.
If you think the number of vacancies on school boards is bad, just wait until we tell you about the number of vacant seats in local newsrooms.
The president’s prescription: Nine months after President Donald Trump said states could get GLP-1 weight-loss drugs at a discount if they agreed to join his administration’s negotiated prices with manufacturers, Indiana is the only state that signed up, per Politico. States aren’t required to cover GLP-1s and officials in Arizona and six other states haven’t decided what to do about them yet. The popularity of the drugs — which can cost as much as $1,000 a month or as little as $350 for Medicaid enrollees on the president’s drug-discount platform, TrumpRx — has exploded in recent years, and officials are hoping GLP-1s can help states avoid the costs of expensive treatments for diabetes and heart disease.
The mayor of Prescott Valley is facing misdemeanor assault and disorderly conduct charges after things got a little out of hand when he sat down at a local bar and started chatting up someone else’s wife.
The short version of this story is: A husband and wife were sitting at the bar. The husband got up, and when he returned, he found 49-year-old Prescott Valley Mayor Kell Palguta in his seat talking to his wife. The two men argued. Palguta backed off, and the man took his bar stool back.
The whole thing could have ended right there.
Instead, Palguta returned to the counter, set his drink down and snatched the stool away with both hands. He grabbed the man by the shoulder and pushed him toward the bar before staff broke up the scuffle.
The entire episode is pretty funny, but our two favorite details of this story are:
The mayor was deep enough in drink to get into a scuffle at the bar by 4 p.m.
The bar is called the “Bird Cage Saloon,” though Palguta decided to just call it simply “a business establishment” in his Facebook post acknowledging the charges.
1 The PAC gave Lamb $2,500 in March, before the whole dick pic story broke — but SRP told us that it “did not make a contribution to Mark Lamb and that will be reflected in our next filing.” It’s unclear if the donation was rescinded.