The Daily Agenda: A website where the sun don't shine

Seeing the money is easier said than done ... He's running, just in case ... And the troll farmer returns.

While perusing the Federal Elections Commission website to check in on congressional fundraising earlier this week, we were struck by how simple yet effective fec.gov is.

With a few clicks, an average person could find almost all of the data they would need to tell who’s funding their local congressperson’s campaign.

Knowing who’s funding politicians is clearly a priority for voters, as they said during last year’s election when more than 72% of voters supported Prop 211, which aims to shine some light on political dark money. 

The law requires political committees to disclose the “original source” of their funds. Currently, many political groups aren’t even required to disclose donors of campaign cash, and even those that do can easily hide the actual source of funding through a series of vaguely named political committees and companies. Prop 211 also added some desperately needed enforcement mechanisms and actual penalties for breaking the law. 

More sunshine and stronger disclosure laws are great. We’re big fans of that stuff.

The problem is, all those new campaign finance disclosures don’t mean much to the average Arizonan if the system for finding them is trash. 

And Arizona’s campaign finance reporting tool — a multimillion-dollar boondoggle of a project spanning three secretary of state administrations — is truly garbage. 

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A bit of history: Back in 2014, former Republican state lawmaker Michele Reagan won the secretary of state’s office on a platform of holding political campaigns accountable and shining a light on dark money. But shortly after winning, her administration ushered in a massive campaign finance overhaul that vastly increased the size of donations to politicians and further protected dark money from disclosure.

In exchange, Reagan promised a sophisticated, state-of-the-art system that would “revolutionize” the way people view campaign spending reports and “blow away” all other campaign finance reporting systems. It would even house all those hard-to-find campaign finance reports from local cities and counties,¹ she promised. 

“The public has no idea [who is influencing whom] unless they want to travel to 200-plus cities and 15 counties and go pull paper records,” Reagan said in 2016. “If you want to get a full, true idea of an individual lobbyist or anyone of who they’re really influencing, you can’t get that right now.”

It was supposed to be ready in time for the 2016 election.

Eight years and three secretaries of state later, Arizonans still don’t have a statewide repository for local campaign finance reports. And that’s probably for the best because the See the Money system is still garbage. 

“It doesn’t work, and we want it to work,” then Secretary of State Katie Hobbs said back in 2019, during her first year on the job.

“I'm hoping we'll be able to (build a better system) quickly,” current Secretary of State Adrian Fontes told us in January, adding that’ll depend on lawmakers’ willingness to provide additional appropriations for the project, which they again didn’t do this year.

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While Prop 211 is still facing ongoing legal challenges, the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission has been developing rules to implement the voter-approved law. The commission stepped in to fill the void back in 2016 when Reagan stopped reporting dark money expenditures and is the primary agency in charge of implementing and enforcing Prop 211. 

But when it comes to the new dark money reports filed under Prop 211, the commission can’t help. The law requires the reports be filed with the Secretary of State’s Office. And it’s not clear the hobbled See the Money system will have the capacity to handle them.

In Phoenix, which passed its own anti-dark money initiative in 2019, the dark money disclosure forms are still paper-based. They’re not integrated into the rest of the campaign finance system, meaning a person would have to know to look at two different portions of the website, and comb through PDF files and add the numbers up, to get accurate spending data.  

It’s not exactly state-of-the-art, but Phoenix has one of the better local campaign finance portals. Given the limitations of See the Money, a similar paper-based system might be the best option the state can provide for the new reports next year.

The 2024 election is right around the corner. Arizonans are about to get pummeled by millions of dollars of political propaganda from billionaires trying to influence their votes.

For the first time, dark money independent campaign groups will actually have to disclose their donors. That’s a big step forward. But finding out who’s funding your local city council member or state lawmaker won’t get any easier.

Betting on the bank shot: Tempe City Councilman Joel Navarro announced he’s running for the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to replace Jack Sellers — but not necessarily to challenge him. Navarro tells Axios Phoenix’s Jeremy Duda that Sellers is doing a “wonderful job,” but he doesn’t think Sellers will survive the rumored primary from the right, potentially by Republican state Sen. Jake Hoffman, who didn’t confirm or deny he was running, but instead told Duda to get “better sources” for his rumors. Sellers’ East Valley district is one of two that Democrats hope to flip next year to take control of the board. 

Classic government: Phoenix officials pledged an ambitious tree-planting program to increase shade in the city by 25% over 20 years. But that was 13 years ago and the city never defined how it would measure “shade” so officials have no idea if they’ve made any progress, the Republic’s Taylor Seely reports. The city has spent at least $17 million on planting trees since 2010 and just beefed up the tree budget to about $1.5 million per year, but officials don’t know how many trees the city has planted or how many it manages and what little data exists implies shade has actually decreased. Tree advocates want some accountability.  

"It is incredibly frustrating ... and it has burned me out of local politics," tree advocate Tabitha Myers told Seely.

Kinda like substitute teachers: Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne struck up a deal with a police moonlighting agency to put off-duty cops in schools, the Arizona Capitol Times’ Kiera Riley reports. Horne said his department couldn’t even spend its School Resource Officer grants because cities are reluctant to lend their officers as SROs since police forces are so short-staffed. The off-duty cops will need eight hours of training, rather than 40, and won’t be at a single school full-time to get to know the students. 

Special session for Don Bolles memorial; elections dates: Election officials want Gov. Katie Hobbs to call a special session next month to solve Arizona’s election dates and deadlines problem, Jen Fifield writes in Votebeat Arizona. Republican leaders don’t see the urgency, and election deniers want to use the opportunity to “address the root of the problem.”  

Isn’t there a word for that?: A major private prison company that houses immigration violators, including in Florence, settled a lawsuit with immigrant rights groups for “forcing detainees to work under the threat of punishment if they refused,” the Republic’s Rafael Carranza writes. This particular lawsuit was for its mistreatment of prisoners in Georgia, but there are other “forced labor” lawsuits against the company.

"They isolate you in the middle of nowhere, literally in the middle of nowhere, to break you mentally and physically. It's a mental game that they're playing," Gonzalo Bermudez Gutierrez, a Phoenix man who was held in the Georgia facility and was one of the plaintiffs, told Carranza.

Californiaing our Arizona faster: 74,000 Californians escaped to Arizona in 2022, up from 69,000 in 2021, the Associate Press reports. Fewer are finding sanctuary in Texas these days where the cost of living continues to climb, and instead, the coastal refugees are seeking safe havens in Florida and Arizona. 

Three years after he was officially banned from the social media site for running a teenager-powered troll farm that pumped out election and COVID disinformation, Republican state Sen. Jake Hoffman is back on Twitter.

He’s even verified. It’s amazing what you can get for $8 per month.

As far as we can tell, Facebook’s ban against him still stands. 

1. To this day, many smaller city or counties don’t even host campaign finance records online.