The Daily Agenda: Ducey’s gift to his successor
The Daily Agenda: Ducey’s gift to his successor
The former gov’s legacy of sweetheart deals lives on ... New news power couple just dropped ... And finally some concessions.
Former Gov. Doug Ducey is officially out the door, but his legacy will live on through a last-minute rewrite of contracts dictating how the state will spend millions of dollars in federal COVID funds for the next three years.
In his final days in office, the Ducey administration rewrote dozens, perhaps hundreds, of contracts between the state and private companies that receive funding through the federal COVID spending package designed to help the community recover from the pandemic so that the incoming governor can’t alter the contracts.
Daniel Ruiz, Ducey’s chief of staff, said the Governor’s Office was clear with Hobbs that it planned to allocate all the remaining money for the contracts, which generally carry through 2025, before leaving office. But recipient organizations got spooked that Hobbs would cancel the contracts and claw back the money to spend it on her own priorities, and they asked Ducey to lock in the spending, Ruiz said.
Ruiz wouldn't say which organizations asked for the change, but said he first asked the Hobbs administration for a handshake agreement that they would leave Ducey’s spending in place, but Hobbs wouldn’t bite. The Hobbs administration said Ruiz had already started changing contracts when they reached out to him and that he never explicitly promised to stop changing them if they agreed to leave the contracts in place. But as the new governor, Hobbs believes she should be able to review and keep or cancel any state contracts, just as her predecessor could, her spokeswoman said.
“We were concerned they were going to unilaterally cancel these contracts,” Ruiz said, noting the new contracts will prevent Hobbs from “pulling the rug” out from under organizations like Goodwill, the Phoenix Symphony and the Barrow Neurological Institute.
The last-minute contract changes mean that organizations that got federal American Rescue Plan Act money from the state cannot have those contracts canceled or changed without a good reason, like companies misusing the funds. Ruiz says it’s about 40 contracts, but Team Hobbs says they think it’s far more, possibly hundreds, though they were still trying to figure out which contracts, exactly, had been changed as of Monday.
The new Ninth Floor staff is still sorting through the paperwork to figure out which contracts have been changed. But they pointed to a handful of contracts that are now locked in that the new governor might like to review, including funding that’s going to A for Arizona, a Ducey- and Arizona Chamber-aligned education group, to administer Ducey’s summer school program, as well as a $6 million contract with the Arizona Chamber Foundation and $50 million to the state Treasurer’s Office to administer school vouchers.
The Hobbs administration is furious. Spokeswoman Murphy Hebert accused the Ducey administration of “unethically alter(ing)” hundreds of contracts to bind the new governor into honoring “sweetheart deals handed out to friends and allies in the very last days of the Ducey administration.”
“Mr. Ruiz’s statement is as deceitful as it is untrue,” Hebert wrote to us. “Mr. Ruiz did not ask the incoming administration their plans for these grants or offer any kind of discussion about them. He simply took unilateral action based on rumors or assumptions about what we were going to do.”
As evidence that the move is shady and outside the norm, the Hobbs administration noted that the state comptroller, who would usually be required to sign off on these kinds of contracts, refused. Instead, Ruiz signed the contracts himself, which is highly unusual, Hebert said. Ruiz noted that the comptroller works for the governor and implied that refusing to sign may have been a career move. Ruiz said he has the authority to sign the contracts instead. Hobbs’ team said nobody on their side asked the comptroller to reject the contract revisions.
Ruiz argued that the federal government gave Arizona money in two lump sums — both during Ducey’s administration — and it’s up to Ducey to spend it as he sees fit. If Congress wanted future governors who weren’t in office at the time ARPA passed to spend the money, they would have set up the program that way, Ruiz said.
But Hobbs’ team countered that the new terms are clearly aimed at tying the new governor’s hands and thwart her agenda, and there’s a good reason they have never been included in state contracts before.
“This is unprecedented and a stark departure from standard (contract) terms,” Hebert said. “That alone indicates these terms are problematic and bad for the state.”
Most transparent audit governor in history: Gov. Katie Hobbs won’t say which deep-pocketed donors are funding her public inauguration ceremony Thursday. Bob Christie writes for Capitol Media Services that having undisclosed “special interests, including lobbyists, companies that do business with the state, developers and builders” pay for the event “stands in contrast to Hobbs’ promise to make her administration ‘the most ethical and accountable’ in history.” In fact, previous governors disclosed the source of those funds. Meanwhile, Hobbs and the rest of the new statewide officials were officially sworn in during a short private ceremony yesterday. (Secretary of State Adrian Fontes also held a separate ceremony last week in his hometown of Nogales, the Nogales International reports.) The Republic’s Mary Jo Pitzl notes that Hobbs’ friend and 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Roopali Desai administered Hobbs’ oath. The move to “hide from” reporters in a private ceremony drew fire from Republic columnist Laurie Roberts.
Like an executive order advent calendar: After her private swearing-in ceremony, Hobbs signed her first executive order, which focuses on employment opportunities. The order directs the Department of Administration to come up with procedures for state agencies on hiring and other employment practices to ensure there’s no discrimination, both related to their own employees and contractors. Hobbs said the first order is part of a “First 100 Days Initiative” that includes 100 actions she’ll take in that time period. No word yet on what the other 99 actions are, but you can get a sense of what she’s looking at by browsing the newly updated “priorities” section of the AZ Governor’s website.
Without water: Hundreds of homes in the Rio Verde Foothills outside Scottsdale lost access to water on Jan. 1, when the City of Scottsdale cut off access to a standpipe residents were using to get and haul water. The residents have sought solutions to their water woes for months, but no temporary or permanent fix has been approved yet. In the meantime, residents found workarounds like rainwater catchment systems and prepared for higher water bills if they got water from elsewhere.
Adios: Former Attorney General Mark Brnovich took to the Washington Examiner to reflect on his eight years in office, bragging about his wins on consumer protection, border security, and fighting Joe Biden. But he didn’t offer much in the way of self-reflection for his role in The War for Democracy — he only mentioned the word “election” once, in relation to his ballot harvesting ban lawsuit.
One last court to pack: Former Gov. Doug Ducey used his final days in office to appoint a bunch of judges after he expanded the state Court of Appeals this year. He appointed six new judges last week, the Republic’s Tara Kavaler reports, including his own former lawyer Anni Foster.
Who knows better than the prison warden?: The Arizona Department of Corrections has forced at least three women to go into labor against their will and before their natural birth time, Jimmy Jenkins writes in the Republic. The prison’s health care provider said it’s the mother’s decision whether to induce labor, but the women who spoke to Jenkins and provided medical records said they didn’t want to be medically induced, but they were given no choice.
“They just told me that someone on a different yard a few years ago went into labor in their cell, and had their baby in the cell, and that's why they induce everyone now,” one of the women who was forced into induced labor told Jenkins.
That’s one metric: The Republic editorial board named Phoenix Mercury star and convicted international weed smuggler Brittney Griner, who the U.S. traded with Russia for an international arms dealer, as its Arizonan of the Year “because no other Arizona newsmaker in 2022 captured the public eye as intensely as she did.”
In this corner…: Two dueling op-eds, one from conservatives at the Goldwater Institute and the other from former ACLU staffer turned Democratic Rep. Analise Ortiz and a rapid housing provider CEO, take on homelessness in the Valley. The liberals urge more rapid housing services, less punishment for homelessness and more affordable housing. The conservatives argue the city’s “cleanups” at the encampment near the state Capitol are a good first step, but Phoenix needs to enforce rules against camping in public and littering and ultimately abolish “the Zone.”
Investigations and sanctions roundup: The Arizona Secretary of State’s Office (under Hobbs) forwarded its investigation of former lawmaker and SOS candidate Reginald Bolding’s too-close-for-comfort relationship between his dark-money nonprofit and campaign to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office for potential prosecution, saying there’s reason to believe he broke the law. Meanwhile, the SOS also sent the AG its investigation into Mark Finchem for failing to include a required “paid for by” notice on a campaign mailer. And Alan Dershowitz, the lawyer in the lawsuit Finchem and Kari Lake, is asking a judge to drop the sanctions against him, saying he really didn’t have anything to do with the bogus complaints the court is citing.
Big money: Arizona’s Politics runs down utility giant Arizona Public Services’ contributions to the Republican Governors Association, which then spent big to try to get Kari Lake elected. APS gave $851,000 to RGA for the election cycle, largely after Lake won the GOP primary. And the RGA put more than $9 million into Lake’s race.
Environment loses: Livestock will still be able to graze near the San Pedro River, a loss for conservationists and others who have noted the harm livestock have done to the environment in the area, including E. coli contamination, the Arizona Daily Star’s Henry Brean reports. Despite the concerns and documented problems with the grazing, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management issued a decade-long extension to grazing leases, with some additional guardrails in place.
A non-election lawsuit to watch: A former teacher at Chandler’s private Valley Christian High School filed a federal lawsuit against the school, claiming he was fired for speaking out against discrimination of LGBTQ students and for his support of LGBTQ people, the Phoenix New Times’ Katya Schwenk reports.
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