The Daily Agenda: The budget nerd report

Friday class is in session ... We will have Shawnna to kick around once again ... And we bought the Trump honey.

The Arizona Joint Legislative Budget Committee released its annual “appropriations report” last week … wait, don’t delete this email yet — it’s actually interesting, we swear.

The JLBC is Arizona’s bean-counting department. It tracks and crunches all the economic data about the state’s budget, economic trends and whether the policies that lawmakers vote on are working, economically speaking. 

If you’re gonna be an Arizona politics geek, you gotta familiarize yourself with JLBC’s data. 

And the best place to start is the annual appropriations report, which provides more than 500 pages of “detailed information” (that’s underselling it) about the state budget. 

But don’t worry — we’re not gonna ask you to actually read it. We’re gonna teach you how to properly skim it.

It’s packed with great data and some charts and graphs that, while artistically lacking, will quickly get you up to speed on the broad strokes of how lawmakers spend your money.

First, the overview: Where does the money come from and where does it go? For that info, turn to the aptly titled Where It Comes From / Where It Goes page. 

In a quick couple of graphs, you understand the big picture of the state budget — including the pot of money we’re usually talking about when we say “budget,” the General Fund. 

So how has that spending changed over the years, you ask? Turn to the Then and Now page, which is packed with simple graphs and stats about how the current budget stacks up against the budget a decade ago. Wanna go farther back, here’s the Then and Now page from a decade ago, which compares 2014 to 2004.

And for answers to burning budget questions, like “How much money did the Department of Education get this year?” and “How much are we budgeting for school vouchers?” or “Are we spending more or less this year on prisons?” check out the narrative summary of the budget. The eight-page memo is well organized, stacked with bullet points and surprisingly easy to understand. 

With those few clicks, you’ll know more about how politicians spend your money than 90% of Arizonans. But for those of you looking for a masters’ class, there are a few more pages you can check out. 

• To drill down to individual departments’ total portions of the budget, check out the budget docs. What are budget docs, you ask? Well, we wrote a whole edition explaining the elusive draft versions of these spreadsheets that float around the Capitol during budget season and how to read them. These are the official versions.

• Want a more detailed summary of how the universities, the corporation commission or any other state entity spends its money? Check out the specific agency page.  

• Need an overview of how the national economic winds might impact the state budget, including specific revenue sources? That’s on the general fund revenue projections pages.

• Wanna geek out on the budget footnotes and the often-curious and overlooked provisions of the budget reconciliation bills (BRBs)? There’s a section for that, too. 

The devil you know: The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors somewhat begrudgingly appointed former lawmaker Shawnna Bolick to replace Steve Kaiser in north Phoenix’s Legislative District 2. Bolick, as previously noted, is Arizona’s answer to Ginny Thomas (they’re even friends!) and has helped stoke the fires of election denialism against the board. But she and the others all told Supervisor Bill Gates, who represents the area and therefore unofficially makes the decision on the appointment, that it’s “time to move on” from the 2020 and 2022 elections, he said. 

They’re all Democrats now: APS kicked in $25,000 to help pay APS-critic and Attorney General Kris Mayes’ legal fees after she won her election, giving the Republic’s Stacey Barchenger a good excuse to expose the shady world of disclosure-free payments from corporations to politicians, which is totally legal in Arizona.

APS has never paid $25,000 in legal fees for us. We rely on our paid subscribers to cover the inevitable legal fees associated with writing this thing.

Legal doesn’t mean smart: Fringe lawmakers have been touring the state telling county boards of supervisors about a resolution they passed — not a law — that says counties don’t have to use machines to count ballots, Votebeat Arizona’s Jen Fifield reports. The resolution doesn’t carry any real legal weight, and their premise is legally debatable. Cochise County is currently appealing a lower court ruling that barred it from recounting, by hand, all of its 2022 ballots after the fact. 

Still summer: 18 people have died from heat in Maricopa County so far this year, the Associated Press’ Anita Snow reports. But methamphetamine was a contributing factor in most heat deaths in the county last year, KJZZ’s Katherine Davis-Young notes. Phoenix cleared out another block of The Zone this week, despite the record heat wave, the Republic’s Juliette Rihl and Helen Rummel write. The New York Times’ Jack Healy hangs out with some air conditioning repairmen, declaring them Phoenix’s most essential workers. And Michael Barbaro, host of the New York Times’ podcast “The Daily,” spoke to Phoenix heat officer and former high school weatherman Dave Hondula about how we survive the heat. But Barbaro still absolutely cannot believe that people live here. 

“In a lot of people’s estimation, a place like Phoenix was never really meant to be lived in at heat levels like this,” Barbaro said. 

Solid base hit: A federal judge barred the state from blocking two trans girls playing sports under a new law. The judge didn’t block the law entirely, as Capitol scribe Howie Fischer reports, and the ruling only applies to the two plaintiffs in the lawsuit, for now. The legal battle is still ongoing, and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, who is defending the law, has vowed to take it to the U.S. Supreme Court.

A trojan horse for RCV?: The open primaries initiative that consultant Chuck Coughlin and crew are still drafting would eliminate the presidential preference election as we know it, eliminate elected precinct committeemen, and possibly open the door to a ranked-choice voting system, since designing the new primary system would fall to lawmakers or the Secretary of State if they can’t do it, Axios Phoenix’s Jeremy Duda writes. Duda paired the new details with some interesting polling results from ASU showing voters overwhelmingly want to eliminate partisan primaries. 

We’re the center of the political universe: A team of reporters at the Washington Post break down the latest “flurry of activity in election-related cases” including the Jan. 6 investigation, and the potentially looming third criminal indictment of Donald Trump. Several Arizonans have thoughts.

“It’s unprecedented that we have a former president being indicted. But he did unprecedentedly bad things and no one is above the law,” Mark Kokanovich, a former federal prosecutor in Arizona, told the Post.

“You do lots of cases against the dealers and the mules, but what you really were after were the leaders, those drug organizations. You wanted to find them and hold them accountable,” Janet Napolitano, the former Arizona governor and attorney general, said, referencing her time as a U.S. Attorney in Arizona.

The environmentalist’s weapon of choice: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced it would once again consider the Pygmy Owl a protected species in parts of Texas and Southern Arizona, the Daily Star’s Tony Davis reports. The adorable fluffs of feather live in saguaros and were central to a legal battle over development in Southern Arizona back in the 1990s before they lost their protected status. Environmentalists hope the protection will serve as a weapon in a legal battle against Interstate 11 development, now that they’re once again protected, Davis writes. 

A man of many actions: Jim Lamon, who lost to Blake Masters in last year’s Republican primary for U.S. Senate, pumped $24,000 into a pro-Ron DeSantis “Actions Speak Louder than Tweets PAC” that is attacking Donald Trump for things he did.

Get a room: We felt a little smarter after reading Republic columnist Joanna Allhands’ nuanced column about the Saudi Arabian company pumping Arizona’s water to grow alfalfa to feed the kingdom’s cattle. But then we read E.J. Montini’s weirdly smutty column about “weather’s bad girl,” AKA monsoons, which “beguile” us and which we “long for” and which “howl” and “whisper” and “soothe” and “agitate” us, and now we just feel dirty. 

“A monsoon storm is someone you were warned about but dated anyway, because it was crazy fun and risky,” Montini writes.

When we saw that former lawmaker and biggest loser of any 2022 Republican statewide candidate Mark Finchem’s grand plan to raise $500,000 for his nonprofit to investigate “phantom voters” was to sell Donald Trump-shaped bottles of honey, our first reaction was to take a long, hard thought about how we’re in the wrong business. 

Our second reaction was to whip out our Agenda credit card and expense the $25.95 for a delicious collector’s item. We’re sorry. We couldn’t resist.

We’ll let you know what “Pure Raw Ultra MAGA Honey” tastes like when/if it arrives.