The Daily Agenda: Photo ops and bills as props

There are always strings attached ... We called it ... And take it from a disbarred attorney.

Republican lawmakers got the headlines and photo-op they sought when they announced they had a plan to boost average teacher pay to $60,000 per year earlier this week.

Now they’ve got to come up with the actual plan. 

In what has become a recurring theme in Arizona’s education battles, Republican lawmakers offered up a proposal to boost education funding — and Democrats and education groups immediately pooh-poohed it, saying the still-unwritten plan doesn’t go far enough and the devil will be in the details. 

They’re right: A $4,000 raise won’t be enough to stymie the steady flow of teachers heading out of state or solve Arizona’s education woes, and the funding will almost certainly come with strings attached.

Another ChatGPT visualization of today’s edition. We love our robot overlords!

Still, Democrats look silly opposing teacher pay increases, as Republic columnist Laurie Roberts notes. They looked just as silly opposing former Gov. Doug Ducey’s 20% teacher pay raise plan, or any other number of Republican-backed education funding increase proposals over recent years. 

Republicans played the politics of the issue masterfully.¹ 

But nailing the policy won’t be so easy. Then again, that wasn’t really the point.  

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Before we get into the wrinkles of this plan, if you can call it that, we need to take a little stroll through history. 

The plan that Republican lawmakers announced Monday isn’t exactly new. It’s basically to tweak and extend Prop 123, which Gov. Doug Ducey championed back in 2016. Prop 123 drew additional money out of the state land trust to fund education. 

The state land trust is essentially all the land granted to Arizona from the federal government at statehood. The state leases that land or sells it off to fuel a giant savings account. Schools get the interest from that account. 

What Prop 123 did was increase payments from the land trust — meaning we were either selling off land faster or spending out of the principal of the savings account. 

So why did we pull more money out of the land trust to begin with? Well, schools had sued the state for illegally cutting voter-approved education funds during the recession, and Prop 123 — which pledged to pay out an additional $3.5 billion to schools over 10 years — was crafted as a settlement agreement to that lawsuit.

At the time, fiscal conservatives hated Ducey’s Prop 123 plan (Democrats, too — then-Sen. Katie Hobbs voted against it). Then-Arizona Treasurer Jeff DeWit, now in charge of the fiscally challenged Arizona Republican Party, was the face of the opposition, leading to one of the more memorable moments in modern Arizona political shenanigans — the time that Ducey’s staffers bullied DeWit with a doughnut.²

Ultimately, Ducey narrowly won over voters, and education was saved!

Just kidding! The #RedForEd movement was born a little more than a year later. (Ducey responded with his #20X2020 plan to raise teacher pay by 20% over three years — another plan that Democrats and education groups initially opposed.)

Prop 123 is expiring in mid-2026, and Republican lawmakers want to ask them to extend it, with some tweaks.

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The sell to voters next year might be easier, considering those doomsday scenarios Democrats and DeWit predicted didn’t come to fruition. The Land Trust is still in a healthy position (though less so than if we hadn’t sold additional land).

But there are still a few hurdles and a few shoes to drop.

To start, a federal judge declared Prop 123 illegal because Arizona didn’t seek Congressional approval before changing the funding formula.³ Congress eventually approved it, but the new plan would also require separate congressional approval, or risk losing another court battle. 

Also, there will almost certainly be devils in the details. 

The fact that Republican Sens. Warren Petersen, Jake Hoffman and Justine Wadsack are backing the idea, along with other conservative hardliners, tells us there’s going to be more to it than a simple funding mechanism. 

These are not people who back teacher raises for the sake of paying teachers more — they will want policy concessions. And whether that’s Wadsack’s book-banning bill, Hoffman’s book-banning bill or something else entirely, it’s probably not going to be anything Democrats or educators like.

Called it: A two-hour hearing of a legislative committee tasked with overseeing the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts concluded with no suggestions on how to adapt the state’s program, as we predicted in Tuesday’s newsletter. Speakers showed up to both decry and praise the program, but none of the eight committee members offered suggestions, despite that being its express purpose, The Republic’s Mary Jo Pitzl reported. Staffers couldn’t provide direct answers on how ESAs are affecting the state’s General Fund, but John Ward, who runs the ESA program for the Department of Education, said the agency intends to make public in the spring a data dashboard with more details on private schooling subsidies. 

Happy birthday!: Arizona might not have enough construction workers to fulfill the billion dollars worth of high-speed internet, highways and public transit projects the state was promised from President Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which turned two years old yesterday, as infrastructure workers age out and job openings surpass hires, the Republic’s Laura Gersony writes. In a move to loosen the bottleneck, Gov. Katie Hobbs announced a $1.25 million investment in construction apprenticeships through the BuilditAZ program, per KTAR’s Brandon Gray. 

Payday delay: Tucson’s proposition to significantly increase the mayor and city council members’ salaries is heading to a recount after final results showed the measure passed by 289 votes, the Tucson Sentinel’s Dylan Smith reports. 

An unexpected garnish: Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport topped the Wall Street Journal’s 2023 ranking of the nation’s best busy airports, Dawn Gilbertson writes. The airport scored well for reliability (thanks to the lack of weather delays in the desert) and showed reasonable costs for airfares and Ubers downtown. Sky Harbor’s concessions workers aren’t as satisfied with conditions, Phoenix New Times’s Serena O'Sullivan writes, and reported claims of rats at the Dunkin’ Donuts and cockroaches in several restaurants. Many of the employees are working with labor unions to fight for better pay and working conditions that have culminated in strikes and picketing. 

"My son went to Four Peaks, and he found a cockroach in his drink," said Ginger Brown, a cashier with SSP America workers. "I see them over at Matt's Big Breakfast, Pita Jungle, I've seen them all over, behind Dunkin' Donuts."

Sports on the chopping block: As the University of Arizona faces a dwindling operating budget, President Robert Robbins is considering making cuts to the university’s beloved sports program, the Star’s Ellie Wolfe reports. The athletics department is operating at a deficit, and men’s sports (not including the lucrative basketball and football programs) will likely take the biggest budget hit due to Title IX guidelines. Meanwhile, some outraged UA employees are calling for an external audit, and the faculty senate could vote on ordering one next week, the Arizona Luminaria’s Carolina Cuellar and John Washington report. 

Legal funds for everyone: U.S. Rep. David Schweikert asked the House Ethics Committee to expand the use of legal expense funds to campaign staffers, vendors and spouses instead of only current and former lawmakers and congressional staffers, Roll Call’s Chris Marquette reports. The funds cover legal fees members encounter in office or while campaigning so they don’t have to use campaign funds.⁴ Some of Schweikert’s family members and campaign team faced defamation lawsuits in his 2022 primary race. 

Taxes for fun: Peoria City Council introduced an ordinance that would erase back taxes for amusement-related businesses after several businesses, including a martial arts school, received an unanticipated tax hit, 12News’ Gabriella Bachara reports. If passed, the tax would instead go into effect next year. 

Rest in peace: Former Phoenix interim mayor and longtime city councilwoman Thelda Williams died Tuesday from cancer. Check out this great profile of her from reporter Jessica Boehm back in 2018.

Kari Lake’s lawyer Bryan Blehm is probably going to get disbarred, according to Kari Lake’s lawyer Bryan Blehm.

He announced that the State Bar is actively investigating his incredibly bizarre tweets containing conspiracies about the Arizona Supreme Court, which controls the State Bar.

His response to the Bar triples down on the weirdness.

And the best part was we learned about it from disbarred former lawyer and prosecutor (of her political enemies) Rachel Alexander.

It was just another totally normal day on Arizona #ElectionTwitter!

1. The proposal was the brainchild of Republican Rep. Matt Gress, who knows exactly how Democrats will react to Republican proposals to increase teacher pay, having served as former Gov. Doug Ducey’s budget director during the 20X2020 era.

2. Unfortunately, the doughnut rabbit hole is too long and strange to summarize here so you’ll just have to read Yvonne Wingett Sanchez’s truly hilarious report from 2016. The memes from that one wrote themselves. 

3. Here’s another fun deep cut: the time Ducey declared that U.S. District Court Judge Neil Wake, who ruled against the governor in the Prop 123 legal battle, “puts on a robe in the morning and thinks he's God, but he's not." Ducey also called Wake an “embarrassment to the legal community” and urged him to retire. (He didn’t.)

4. Schweikert used massive amounts of his campaign funds in 2020 to pay for lawyers to fight his ethics charge.