The Daily Agenda: Good job, lawmakers!

Now get out of the way ... And the winners are: All incumbents! ... And some people just have that spark for the stage.

Roads and freeways in the Valley will continue to be built, and the Light Rail will continue to exist, if not grow, after lawmakers and Gov. Katie Hobbs struck a deal to extend Prop 400, Maricopa County’s half-cent sales tax for transportation infrastructure, for another 20 years.¹

It’s hard to get excited over the status quo.² And the new deal is actually a downgrade from the status quo, assuming you like public transit. But compared to the alternative, staying the course is pretty monumental. 

Also a big deal is the fact that lawmakers actually came together on a compromise package, overruling the obstinate Freedom Caucus, which wanted to kill the tax extension. 

But that compromise wasn’t necessarily 50-50. To dislodge the bill, Democrats and the governor acquiesced to Republicans’ demands that the new Prop 400 increases funding for highways and surface roads and curtails public transit funding, including killing off any ability for the tax to pay for Light Rail expansion. (That doesn’t prevent other funds from paying for Light Rail extension lines, however.)

Besides negotiating for changes to the funding formula, conservative lawmakers extracted other concessions, including:

• Prohibiting any public funding, not just Prop 400 funds, from being used to put a Light Rail stop near the state Capitol. 

• Cranking up the speed limit on Interstate 17 to 65 miles per hour, from 55. 

• Barring any funds from being used to implement “road diets” AKA bike lanes.

• Stopping cities from outlawing the sale of gas cars, which as far as we know, no city was looking to do.

Additionally, the grand bargain lawmakers struck included Hobbs signing at least one unrelated bill: cutting off cities’ ability to charge taxes on rent. That was a pretty big concession from the governor, considering many of her allies in city government were staunchly opposed to it. 

Conservative lawmakers either got far more than they deserved out of the deal, or the Freedom Caucus got rolled on it, depending on if you read Abe Kwok or Laurie Roberts, respectively. 

We’d say both are true, and more. Republican leaders drove a hard bargain on Prop 400, and they won significant concessions. But when that wasn’t enough for the Freedom Caucus types, Republican leaders, including, notably, Senate President and Freedom Caucus member Warren Petersen, finally bucked their party’s far-right wing. 

But it wasn’t just Democrats who compromised.

Republicans voting for a tax is itself a significant concession. Those who backed the new Prop 400 chose actual leadership over party dogma and activists’ demands. Not extending the tax would have been disastrous. 

Can you imagine the traffic in the Valley if we didn’t have the 101, the 202 or the 303? What would Downtown Phoenix be without the Light Rail? Or downtown Mesa, for that matter? And that’s not to mention the hundreds or thousands of road-building and widening projects Prop 400 has paid for in its nearly 40-year history. 

Or forget the traffic problem: Would the Valley as we know it even exist today if not for the roads to connect the many metropolitan areas? Would any major corporation want to move its headquarters to a place with bad roads and no freeways? Probably not. 

And as rural lawmakers noted, the ripple effect of killing Prop 400 would reach far beyond Phoenix. Without Prop 400, every municipality in the state would have been pitted against the behemoth Maricopa County and its major cities in the race for limited federal transportation dollars. 

For good or ill, the Valley survives on growth. Killing Prop 400 wouldn’t have stopped that growth — it just would have meant we stopped managing it. The Valley narrowly averted that disaster scenario thanks to compromise from our political leaders at the Capitol. But this political football should have never been handed off to lawmakers in the first place. 

The Republic’s Mary Jo Pitzl has explained the strange origins of the law requiring lawmakers to initiate any tax increase in Maricopa County, and only in Maricopa County. But in simple terms, it was an arbitrary demand from one lawmaker more than 20 years ago. If Maricopa County voters want to tax themselves for roads — or not — that should be a question for Maricopa County, not the Legislature. 

Now that lawmakers have solved the immediate threat of Prop 400 expiring, they should take on what will be an even bigger challenge: Giving up their own power over Maricopa County voters’ ability to decide for themselves how to plan their growth. 

Tucson City Council incumbents won their primary races last night, with Lane Santa Cruz and Paul Cunningham easily dispatching their challengers, continuing a 31-0 streak of incumbents winning primary elections since 1995, our sister newsletter, the Tucson Agenda, reports. And if history is any guide, the incumbents aren’t likely to face upsets in November either: With a few exceptions, most city council members in Tucson are only elected when there’s an open seat with no incumbent running.

Sanity prevails: Mohave County supervisors decided against launching a full hand count of the 2024 election and stuck with using the more accurate, faster, machine tabulators that the county has been using for decades without incident. In a 3-2 vote, supervisors shot down the plan that Elections Director Allen Tempert begrudgingly drafted to spend $1.1 million — or more than his entire annual budget — on the poorly thought-out hand-count project.  

Six down, many to go: State senators approved the confirmation of Gov. Katie Hobbs’ pick to lead the Department of Public Safety, Jeffrey Glover, on their final day of the session. Glover is the sixth director senators have confirmed, the Republic’s Stacey Barchenger notes. Department directors can serve for up to a year without Senate confirmation, and it seems unlikely that lawmakers will come into a special session to confirm more before next year’s legislative session.

Mr. Wall Street goes to Washington: Former Wall Street executive Conor O’Callaghan announced he’s joining the dogpile of Democratic candidates seeking to challenge Republican U.S. Rep. David Schweikert next year in Arizona’s competitive Congressional District 1. Meanwhile, former Republican state lawmaker Jeff Weninger is attempting to win back his old House seat in the competitive Legislative District 13, the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy writes. The district’s voters chose Republican Liz Harris to represent them in the last election when Weninger ran for state treasurer, but then Harris got expelled and replaced with Republican Julie Willoughby. The district’s other House seat is held by Democrat Jennifer Pawlik. 

“Nobody epitomizes the threat to my kids’ future like David Schweikert,” O’Callaghan said as the screen cuts to an image of a newspaper talking about Schweikert’s vote to throw out the results of the 2020 election. 

Mark gives it a freaking rest: Failed secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem dropped his appeal of his failed lawsuit challenging the results of the 2022 election, which he lost by the widest margin of any statewide Republican, Arizona’s Law notes. He’s still appealing the $48,000 in sanctions he and his lawyer got slapped with for filing a nonsense lawsuit. 

We’re drafting a bill to require all court sanctions from election-related cases to go into a slush fund for locally owned independent news companies. But until that goes through, we could use your support!

On deadlines and starting dates: The election season has officially begun, as the Arizona Citizens Clean Election Commission announced yesterday that the window is now open for candidates to start qualifying for public financing in the 2024 election. And after lawmakers ended the legislative session on Monday, we finally know when all the laws they passed this year will go into effect: October 30. 

Hell is a locked Tesla: President Joe Biden is coming to Arizona next week, even though it’s really hot. It’s so hot, in fact, that the New York Times declares Arizona “hell” during the month of July, which will henceforth be known as “an entire month of merciless heat that has ground down people’s health and patience.” But at least we’ve got ice in hell! Lauren Gilger of KJZZ’s “The Show” spoke to author Amy Brady about her book documenting the history of man-made frozen water, explaining how without it, Phoenix would truly be hell. And a Peoria man got locked in his Tesla in the heat after his battery died, leaving him no way to open the door. It happens more often than you might think, ABC15’s Jennifer Kovaleski reports.

Easy for him to say: Longtime school voucher fan Robert Robb writes that the politics of vouchers have irreversibly changed now that 60,000 kids use the program, and opponents should focus their energy looking forward to accountability reforms, rather than backwards to repeals or caps on the program. And tactics like the “shamefully misleading” memo that Gov. Katie Hobbs wrote declaring vouchers could account for more than half of “all new K-12 education spending” aren’t helping their cause, Robb writes on his Substack. 

She’s running: U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema worked her bipartisan magic to move the annual defense bill through the Senate last week. Then, she explained how her magic works in “a rare interview” with Politco’s Huddle newsletter.

Kangaroo on the loose: A private petting zoo in Marana is missing its “only kangaroo, a capybara, and two African crested porcupines," after storm winds tore animal enclosures apart, the Daily Star’s Eddie Celaya reports. And speaking of animals, former Arizonan and one-time White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham is now running an animal rescue in Kansas, the Republic’s Allie Feinberg notes.

"It's hard to look for animals that are the color of the desert," Geordi Davisson, co-owner of Ghost Ranch Exotics, told Celaya. 

If Mohave County Elections Director Allen Tempert decides that running elections in Arizona’s most conservative county is too much trouble, we believe he could seamlessly make the transition into stand-up comedy. 

It’s not that he’s hilarious, necessarily. But the way he heckled his hecklers at the Mohave County Board of Supervisors yesterday — he was there to pan supervisors’ half-baked idea to count all ballots by hand — proves he’s ready for life on a stage. 

The whole hearing is worth watching, since Tempert thoroughly eviscerates the argument for hand-counting ballots, noting that the plan he put together at supervisors’ request would result in errors, blow a hole in the department’s budget, and would be, for all intents and purposes, logistically impossible. 

But our favorite part came when he turned to the audience and asked how many of them were poll workers, then asked if those who raised their hands think they could count all the ballots cast accurately after their shifts. 

“Oh come on. Bullshit,” he said, when the rowdy crowd responded they could.

As a one-time poll worker, Hank can confirm you absolutely do not want the exhausted, undertrained and poorly paid part-time workers who man the polling stations counting your ballots after a 16-hour shift. 

1. Of course, the new Prop 400 is not actually a done deal. Voters still need to weigh in on the extended tax in next year’s election. But that seems like a pretty safe bet. 

2. However, the Legislature did finally end its longest session in history, so that’s exciting. Except it happened during the daytime, so it was less exciting than usual.