The Daily Agenda: January is nearly here
The Daily Agenda: January is nearly here
Apply now! ... Even the Cyber Ninjas' lawyer won't touch Cochise County ... And go back to New Mexico.
Speaking of the new year, we’re slowing down a little bit this month to save our strength for January, so we’re not publishing tomorrow.
After this election is certified, we’re going to take some time to rest and regroup so we can come out swinging in 2023.
Thanks for your continued support! We’ll be back in your inbox Monday.
The inauguration date is set for Arizona’s new slate of statewide elected officials, and in the next five weeks before they’re sworn in, those new politicians have a lot to do.
In the top three statewide offices, the elected Democratic politicians will be brand new to the jobs. They’ll face a steep learning curve, tight timelines, a daunting number of hiring decisions and intense scrutiny as they prepare for the Jan. 5 inauguration ceremony.
And as the first Democrats in nearly a generation to occupy any of those positions, it’s not like there are a lot of Democrats they can turn to for advice.
Successfully managing the transition into any statewide office is a Herculean task that takes tight coordination between a small army of people. But no position is as challenging to take on as the state’s top office, where Katie Hobbs will face immediate make-or-break decisions about how to run her own office, not to mention the dozens of massive state agencies she will oversee.
“This is the very definition of putting a plane together while flying it,” one political staffer familiar with the transition process said. While Hobbs brings to the office a wealth of knowledge and connections from her years in government, “none of that comes close to being the person in the cockpit.”
Within a week of actually assuming the office, Hobbs has to execute the inauguration ceremony and deliver a State of the State speech to the Legislature, then draft a budget by the following week while crafting a policy platform and preparing a strategy to push it through the Republican-controlled Legislature.
But the first and perhaps most crucial decision that the new governor will have to make is who to hire for her executive staff and agency heads. There are dozens if not hundreds of positions to fill. So many, in fact, that Hobbs’ transition team, which is tasked with finding her the best and the brightest talent, has put up an open portal soliciting resumes for unspecified positions.
And the new Democratic officials will face a hurdle that Republicans wouldn’t: After decades out of power in Arizona, Democrats have fewer experienced hands to rely upon to build the team that will determine their success or failure. The list of Democratic operatives still working in Arizona who remember the Janet Napolitano years is pretty short. (On that short list, however, is Mike Haener, the co-chair of Hobbs’ transition team who served as deputy chief of staff to Napolitano.)
Hobbs has a broad braintrust to draw from in the Secretary of Staff’s Office and among Senate Democratic Caucus staff, and she has turned to them first for some top positions. But partly because of her general philosophy of bipartisan collaboration, and partly out of necessity, a significant fraction of her close circle will likely come from the other side of the aisle, according to Joe Wolf, a senior campaign adviser who advises, but is not part of, the transition team.
“There's gonna be a lot of Republicans in the administration because there's just not that many Democrats who have been doing this stuff, because there haven’t been many Democrats in these positions the last 20 years,” he said.
New problem, same as the old problem: A bipartisan crew of state lawmakers (Republicans Michelle Udall, Joanne Osborne and Joel John, and Democrats Sean Bowie, Christine Marsh and Jennifer Pawlik) is holding a press conference today at 11 a.m. to urge Gov. Doug Ducey to call a special session before January to increase or eliminate the aggregate expenditure limit, which caps the amount schools can spend and which schools will again exceed by March 2023.
Popping in to check out AZ: President Joe Biden will be coming to Phoenix next week for his first presidential visit to the state to check out the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., a new facility that represents the “largest foreign direct investment in Arizona history,” the Republic reports. Biden visited while a candidate in 2020.
Probably illegal: Attorney Bryan Blehm turned down a request from the Cochise County supervisors to represent them in two court cases, both set for a hearing at 1 p.m. today, that they face after refusing to certify their election results. The board had authorized Blehm to serve as outside counsel before actually seeing if he’d agree. Cochise County Attorney Brian McIntyre refused to represent them in the case and he told Capitol Media Services’ Howie Fischer that he’s exploring potential criminal charges against the two supervisors who refused to certify the county’s results, Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd. Ann English, the board chair who has been the lone voice in favor of certification, is stuck in the middle of a chaotic situation.
"I feel like I am in the middle of a tornado that keeps staying in place and I cannot get out safely," English told Capitol Media Services. "I have no control of the tornado, only my actions."
Weak link: While counties refusing to certify elections is still very rare, these local officials provide one way for election deniers to disrupt the process, showing what could happen in 2024 and how the courts may react, the Associated Press’ Nicholas Riccardi reports.
Crunching the numbers: ABC15’s Garrett Archer looked at historical turnout data for the state and Maricopa County, finding that the printer problems on Election Day likely did not cause massive amounts of people to not vote, debunking the myths of losing candidates and their allies. Midterm turnout in the county was higher than the state as a whole and higher than average turnout for Maricopa County midterms.
Hotly anticipated: GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who lost her race by more than 17,000 votes, continues to claim she will file a lawsuit over her loss. On right-wing radio talk show host’s Garret Lewis’ show, Lake said she intends to file suit after the state certifies the election, which is required for lawsuits to get underway.
Should, but won’t: Legal ethics experts told the Republic’s Robert Anglen that assistant attorney general Jennifer Wright of the AG’s elections integrity unit should recuse herself from any investigations into the election issues in Maricopa County because her online posts have shown bias in favor of her preferred candidates and against the county. Wright sent a letter to the county asking legal questions about the printer problems.
Mystery dinos: Someone put up dinosaur sculptures (a triceratops, a brontosaurus and two velociraptors, specifically) at 9th Avenue and Jackson, in the downtown homeless encampment, seemingly to prevent people from camping in the area, Fox10 reports. It’s not clear who put them there — nearby business owners say it wasn’t them. The city says the sculptures aren’t authorized to be there and need to be taken down.
That’s one way to govern: The Mohave County Board of Supervisors will consider whether to refuse all external grants at a meeting next week, the Havasu News reports. The agenda item comes after the board has rejected grants for health and community services recently. The item, added by Supervisor Buster Johnson, says that “if these grants don’t fit the direction that the county wants to go in, maybe we should turn them all down.”
On their own: Gila Community College wants to be a standalone college instead of getting its accreditation and needing approval for certain things from Eastern Arizona College, but the road to going fully independent is long and cumbersome, the Payson Roundup’s Peter Aleshire reports.
Where they are now: A bunch of Arizona elected officials, including Gov. Doug Ducey, are at an American Legislative Exchange Council event in Washington, where Ducey was awarded a Thomas Jefferson Freedom Award for his administration’s tax cuts and universal vouchers.
The small band of election deniers who want a “re-vote” have come from out of state to protest our elections, some of them traveling in a “QAnon-themed Scooby Doo van,” the Daily Beast reports. One of them who spent several days sitting at the Capitol is now heading back to New Mexico because “it doesn’t seem like the people of Arizona cared.”
Enjoy your time off. Soon the leg. Will be in session and none of us will be safe.
Another very informative column about how the various gears of state governance grind. Down here in the Old Pueblo our county board of supervisors is a generally tame affair compared to what goes on with the Maricopa board. I'm rather astonished that the much-maligned "Rinos" aka sane people grounded in reality have been able to retain their board majority. Are elections for those seats staggered? And is it likely that they will be able to keep these election-denying nutters at bay?