The Daily Agenda: The bills are coming!

A sneak preview of reruns? ... The economies of scales on pianos ... And remember, you can always quit!

The next legislative session is still months away, but lawmakers are already hard at work drafting — and more often, redrafting — bills to introduce in January. 

The Arizona Legislative Council, the team of lawyers who actually write the bills, tells us they’re already working on requests for about 180 bills so far, of the more than 1,500 that will likely be introduced next year. As always, lawmakers will have lots of new ideas (some smart, some hair-brained) to deal with the problems that plague Arizona (some real, some imagined).

But the deepest well of material will come from rerun bills — those unlucky pieces of legislation that didn’t make it through the process, falling victim to committee hearing deadlines, floor votes or the governor’s prolific veto stamp. 

So we called a handful of key lawmakers to see what they’ve been working on this summer and which of their bills we should expect to see as reruns next year. 

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Elections

The Legislature’s band of election deniers are sure to propose many of the same absurdist bills to hand-count ballots and ban mail-in voting. But those bills don’t stand a chance of getting signed into law anyway. 

Instead, look to Republican Sen. Ken Bennett, the former secretary of state, Senate president and Cyber Ninjas liaison to the Senate, to propose election integrity bills that might actually not be bad — and might escape Gov. Katie Hobbs’ veto stamp. 

Hobbs shot down his bill to publicly release images of all ballots and the “cast vote record” that details how votes were tabulated, saying it could compromise voter anonymity, among other problems. But Bennett thinks he’s found a solution to her objection by simply allowing counties that want to post that material to do so and limiting it to the general election, which will cut down on the threat of compromising individual voters’ votes. 

Maricopa County and others told him they want to post the data, he said, in hopes that it will cut down on conspiracies. And he’s asked the governor’s team if she’s willing to accept those changes. 

“They are more amenable (to the new version) but they haven’t committed to anything,” he said. 

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Education

Perhaps the oldest rerun bill could be Bennett’s attempt to “blow up” the entirety of the state’s education laws and start over, basically from scratch. 

He tried the same thing more than 20 years ago and “everyone laughed at me,” he said. But when it became clear the bill actually had a chance, everyone stopped laughing and killed it. 

Two decades later, still nobody has taken a holistic look at Arizona’s education laws and funding mechanisms, he said, and perhaps it’s time to try again. At the very least, he’ll propose bills to flatten the funding gap between schools and remove regulations from public schools, he said. But he’s been talking over a complete rewrite of Arizona’s education laws with a working group this summer. 

“If we were starting from scratch and said how would we like to design a system of education in Arizona for 1.1 million kids with 16.5 billion dollars a year total spending divided into those three major categories (public, charter and private schools), what would it look like?” he asked. “I don't think it would look like what we have now.”

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Housing

Affordable housing will be at the top of the legislative agenda again next year after cities demolished a proposed housing reform package this year. The issue’s chief Republican champion, Sen. Steve Kaiser, quit the Legislature shortly after, unconvincingly claiming the two things had nothing to do with each other and leaving the fate of housing reform at the Capitol uncertain.

Now, Democratic Rep. Analise Ortiz is attempting to pick up some of the pieces of that compromise package and run them as standalone bills.

She’s reviving a few provisions that cities killed last year, including automatically allowing low-income developments near the Light Rail. She knows cities will try to kill that bill again, and considering Republicans aren’t big fans of by-right zoning, she doesn’t have high hopes for that idea.

Still, she’s optimistic that some smaller proposals can make it through the Legislature, including a bill to bar cities from banning homeowners from building casitas, and a bill to require cities to provide an annual report on the state of housing, which she described as the “bare minimum.”

“It's a small step, but I think an important step to be able to hold cities’ feet to the fire in the future on whether they are in fact meeting their housing needs,” she said. 

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Culture wars

Republican Sen. John Kavanagh, perhaps the Legislature’s most prolific sponsors of controversial “culture war” legislation, said it would be a waste of time to send Hobbs the same bills she vetoed last year. And there were a lot of them… Hobbs vetoed 30 of his bills last year if you include the 13 budget bills in his name.  

Instead, he’s zeroing in on a handful of bills that he can water down and use to test the governor’s limits.

He won’t exactly bring back the “bathroom bill” that would have banned transgender kids from using the bathroom of their choice in schools, for example. He first introduced a version of that bill a decade ago, with little luck. Instead, he’s limiting the bill to just locker rooms and school showers this year, he said. 

“I mean, I'm not 100% sure that the governor is really comfortable with a 14-year-old female high school freshman standing next to a transgender woman who is actually an 18-year-old biological male in a shower, so maybe we have a common ground,” Kavanagh told us. 

And his bill to ban teachers from calling students by their preferred pronouns without parental permission will instead become a bill requiring schools to notify parents en masse if they allow teachers to refer to students by their preferred pronouns, he told us. 

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Don Bolles

Yes, this entire email was just an excuse to mention the Don Bolles memorial bill that the Agenda inspired last year. It’s coming back, too, Democratic Rep. Jennifer Longdon tells us¹. She’s hoping to draft a crew of Republican co-sponsors to bring the bill to the finish line this year. 

Every (home)school gets a piano: ABC15’s Melissa Blasius and Garrett Archer dug into the receipts for what parents are buying with their school vouchers. Mostly, it was tuition, but there were a lot of questionable expenses, including $10,000 at a sewing machine company, more than 100 passes to Arizona Snowbowl ski resort, $350,000 for ninja warrior training centers, trampoline parks and climbing gyms, $1.2 million spent on martial arts instruction and a $4,000 piano. 

“These are absolutely allowable,” John Ward, executive director of the ESA program for the Arizona Department of Education, said. “Now, if it was a luxury piano, some type of grand piano, baby grand, we may not approve that as a luxury item.”

The leases are all dried up: Gov. Katie Hobbs announced that her Land Department was pulling all the contracts for Fondomonte, the Saudi Arabian subsidiary that uses lots of water in northwestern Arizona to grow alfalfa for its cows back home, where growing alfalfa is illegal. Hobbs said state inspectors found the company had defaulted on one of its four leases back in 2016, and because it hadn’t fixed the problem, the state wouldn’t renew the other leases when they expire early next year. Fondomonte isn’t thrilled and is threatening to “explore all avenues to ensure there is no discrimination or unfair treatment,” 12News reports. 

All stories have an Arizona angle: U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is out, thanks to the help of two of Arizona’s most far-right congressmen. Andy Biggs and Eli Crane were among the eight Republicans who joined with Democrats to oust McCarthy, making Arizona the only state with two Republicans who voted to depose the speaker. 

Speaking of wasteful spending: State auditors are giving the Arizona Commerce Authority the side-eye after finding it spent $2.4 million over the past five years wooing CEOs into moving to Arizona with sports tickets, booze and other luxuries, the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy writes. Wooing CEOs is literally the entire reason the ACA exists, but it may be a violation of the state Constitution’s gift ban clause, auditors said. They asked Attorney General Kris Mayes to look into it. 

Keep Tucson nutty: The candidates for Tucson City Council and mayor have some pretty nutty views on the United Nations, 5G cell towers and 15-minute cities, as our sister newsletter, the Tucson Agenda details. 

“What the August primary elections lacked in drama, the November general election is making up for with nuttiness,” reporter Curt Prendergast explains. 

“You never feel safe”: Amid the City of Phoenix’s ongoing struggle to clear out “The Zone,” KJZZ’s “The Show” spoke to one of its residents about what life is like there. Noel Reeves, who has been homeless for about a year, said survival there is hard, but many people need a nudge to get help. 

“I wish to God I could find the sign that reads ‘You are now leaving Phoenix.’ I promise you I won’t come back,” he said.

Moving on up: Our old Agenda partner Rachel Leingang landed a new gig on the national desk of the Guardian U.S. covering American democracy and misinformation from Minneapolis. Cheerio, friend! Carry on.  

There’s something so vicariously satisfying about watching someone quit their job in a blaze of glory. 

So today we celebrate Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone for doing just that. 

After seven years on the job attempting to clean up the legal mess that Sheriff Joe Arpaio left the office with, Penzone has finally had enough. 

“I’ll be damned if I’ll do three terms under federal court oversight for a debt I never incurred,” he told reporters at a press conference announcing his looming resignation, effective January.

The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors will pick someone to fill out the remaining year of Penzone’s term before the next sheriff’s race in 2024. 

Of course, the Phoenix New Times had to ask Arpaio: “Are you running?”

Fortunately, Arpaio is already occupied with his second run for mayor of Fountain Hills.

1. Though we decided that it’s best for the bill if Hank isn’t involved, considering his long list of … let’s go with “non-fans” … at the state Capitol.