The Daily Agenda: The complaints keep coming
The Daily Agenda: The complaints keep coming
You are cordially invited to roast Rep. Leezah Sun ... Fake electors commit real crimes ... And don't look up.
As House Ethics Committee members prepare for an evidentiary hearing into the bizarre antics of Democratic Rep. Leezah Sun, accounts of the first-term lawmaker letting that modicum of power go to her head are still piling in.
Roger Freeman, the superintendent of the Littleton Elementary School District, wrote to Ethics Committee chair Rep. Joseph Chaplik last month that, during what he thought would be an innocuous meeting to discuss legislation, Sun threatened his job.
“I didn’t know Leezah at the time so I just sat there and listened,” he wrote in a letter we found through a public records request.
Freeman said that during that meeting last December, about a month before Sun was officially sworn in as a lawmaker, Sun broke into a long rant defending Markus Ceniceros, a high school senior and candidate for the Littleton School Board who worked on Sun’s legislative campaign and was criminally charged for stealing opponents’ signs on Sun’s behalf. (He won his race.)
The West Valley News had run a gleaming profile of Ceniceros in which he criticized the board. School district board President Kathy Reyes fired back in an opinion piece criticizing the article for “disparaging the governance and management of the district from the point of view of a high school student.”
Sun didn’t like that.
“She said that (Ceniceros) was her protégé and the only reason she hadn't already 'gone after' the District was because he asked her not to,” Freeman wrote in the letter to Chaplik.
After an unfruitful verbal ping pong match, Freeman said Sun posed an ominous threat: “She asked if I was familiar with SB1487.”
That’s a 2016 state law that allows any lawmaker to force the attorney general to investigate local governments or school districts. It also requires the AG to withhold funding from cities and towns if they find legal violations.1
The law has been used many times to successfully challenge local control, including Sen. Warren Petersen’s request to overturn Paradise Valley's short-term rental ordinance or former Sen. Kelly Townsend’s challenge of vaccine mandates for city employees.
“(Sun) told me it was the bill that she could have anybody investigated for any reason. I asked what the allegation was and she said it didn't matter because she could say anything,” Freeman wrote.
Meanwhile, House Ethics Committee members were invited this week to submit a list of witnesses about Sun’s behavior ahead of the Dec. 19 evidentiary hearing.
The list of potential witnesses is long.
Besides Freeman, there are the three Tolleson employees who got a restraining order against Sun after she allegedly threatened an employee’s life.
Or the parties involved in a child custody dispute that Sun allegedly inserted herself in. The mother of the children was Littleton Elementary School District Governing Board member Rachel Cardona Barnett, and a custody supervisor said Sun purported to intervene on behalf of Attorney General Kris Mayes. Sun, who didn’t return our calls for comment, has semi-disputed both of those allegations.
Perhaps the committee will even invite her former campaign manager, Emilio Avila, who told us about a pattern of aggressive actions culminating in an expletive-filled eruption at a polling station. He seems more than happy to share his experiences.
“She talks about karma and how everything comes back to get people who do bad things…. It's great to see that now she's getting exposed for what she is — a complete fraud of a person. It’s just great to see this happen,” he told us last month when news of Sun’s erratic behavior started trickling out.
Sun has filed paperwork to run a primary challenge against her Democratic seatmate, Sen. Eva Diaz in the upcoming election. But it doesn’t appear she has much support in the Democratic ranks. Her colleagues seem poised to kick her out of the Legislature, and her district’s activists are tired of her antics.
If Sun is ultimately expelled from the House, Tina Gamez, chair of the District 22 Democrats, didn’t have much insight into who might replace her. Gamez is, however, disappointed in the behavior of the lawmaker she once had high hopes for.
“She has great progressive values, but you have to also be conscientious in how you treat other people, how you carry yourself,” Gamez said. “I think the rumblings that I've heard, many of the people in our district want her out.”
Now do Arizona: Nevada’s attorney general is charging his state’s fake electors, making it the third state to take up the case, the Washington Post reports. Meanwhile, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes is meeting with former Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro, hoping he’ll testify if she prosecutes Arizona’s fake electors. But Republican lawmakers — including fake elector Jake Hoffman — want to impeach Mayes for prosecuting the Cochise County supervisors who tried to not certify the election.
The door revolves: One of Bill Jabjiniak last acts as Mesa’s economic development director was to warn the town council about the energy-hungry, job-light data centers moving to town. But now that he got hired by data center giant EdgeCore, his job is to assure local governments that data centers are good for town, the East Valley Tribune’s Scott Shumaker reports.
Task forces are for stating the obvious: Gov. Katie Hobbs’ Educator Retention Task Force delivered its recommendations for keeping teachers in the profession yesterday, the Arizona Mirror’s Caitlin Sievers reports. The proposals include groundbreaking ideas like paying teachers more, giving them more paid leave days and decreasing the cost of their health insurance. The task force also recommended creating a new “educator advisory group” to keep tabs on the problem. Perhaps the Buckeye Elementary School District can afford a few teacher raises. It recouped $400,000 in overcompensation from its former superintendent, Kristi Wilson, ABC15 reports.
Just once, we’d like to read about a scandal where a teacher or reporter is overcompensated.
Training laws coming to Arizona?: ProPublica and the Texas Tribune did a deep dive into how students and teachers knew the drill when an active shooter turned up in Uvalde, but the police were utterly clueless about how to handle the situation.
“At least 37 states have laws mandating that schools conduct active shooter-related drills. … In contrast, only Texas and Michigan have laws requiring training for all officers after they graduate from police academies,” the team wrote, noting that Texas’ police training law only came after the Uvalde shooting.
Trending in the wrong direction: Mount Graham red squirrels are getting a little more endangered, scientists found in their annual survey of the Southern Arizona squirrel. They found 144 of the little critters, which have been listed as endangered since 1987. That’s about a dozen fewer than last year, but still up from 109 in 2021, the Associated Press reports.
Please let it be the shaman: The Phoenix New Times’ TJ L'Heureux looks into the power void in Congressional District 8, where Debbie Lesko is retiring, writing that the race is “sucking in desperate, disgruntled and even disgraced Republicans from around Arizona.” It’s a crowded GOP primary in a conservative stronghold, and everyone is waiting to see if Donald Trump will issue an endorsement.
“It appears at this point, they’re trying to figure out whose tinfoil hat is the shiniest,” Democratic consultant Stacy Pearson told L’Heureux.
Welcome the new guy: Coconino County has a new supervisor. Army veteran Adam Hess will take over for 27-year Supervisor Matt Ryan upon Ryan’s retirement at the end of the year, the Daily Sun’s Cody Bashore reports. And since Flagstaff voters shot down Prop 480, which would have allowed for a new hospital to be built in town, a lot of other projects in the area are now being put on hold, the Sun’s Abigail Kessler reports.
Tourism and trees dying: The manager of Las Palomas Resort in Rocky Point, Hector Vasquez, told Lauren Gilger on KJZZ’s “The Show” that the border closing in Lukeville is going more to nuke tourism in the town than the COVID-19 lockdowns did. Also, don’t miss the weird history of Aleppo pine trees in the Valley in yesterday’s edition of “The Show.”
“If you remember the border was not closed. There was a permit for Americans to come or essential travel. Right now, it's 100% closed and 100% closed for something that humans can control,” he said.
Yesterday’s theme in Valley news was threats from the sky.
In Scottsdale, a fancy new hotel set to open in a matter of weeks had to ask the city council to approve new design plans because the ledges they built are already covered in bird poop, and that’s not the kind of view they’re selling for up to $3,000 per night.
And in Glendale, about 9,000 APS customers lost power yesterday after Mylar balloons collided with a major power line.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this edition didn’t catch Sun’s error in claiming 1487 applies to school districts. While there have been attempts to expand it to cover schools, it currently only covers cities and towns
I’d like to make sure I’m understanding this correctly because it sounds insane. That cannot be true.
My children had to undergo biannual *traumatic* active shooter drills at their school that, frequently, left many of the children in tears.
Meanwhile, in a state with some of the lowest funding for public education in the nation, my school district pays- out of its own budget- roughly 60% of the full time salaries of its campus SROs (school resource officer). That annual expense, mind you, adds to the “administrative costs” for which the district is derided by conservatives who say they want people armed to the teeth at the schools but don’t quite understand who and how one pays for that so they both require you to have them but also sh*t on you for not using that money for a math teachers.
Anyway, back to the point...teachers lose valuable classroom instruction time and children must undergo traumatic (and completely useless) drills but we don’t require the actual ARMED PROFESSIONALS to train for active shooters? God damn. I mean, they must do that on their own, right? Because, what even are we doing here if the Phoenix and Scottsdale Police Departments don’t know they should train for active shooters- especially at schools. But, how is this not *required* by law?
It’s so important to the “safety” of your child that republicans in the state legislature keep trying to pass school bathroom bills but it has never once occurred to them that maybe this would be a seemingly more legitimate use of their time?
(And, to be crystal clear, I think the drills are useless for everyone. We need better gun laws in this country. And, anyone wishing to engage by replying is 100% wasting their time- you will not change my mind I don’t care how much you love flags and like sleeping with a copy of the constitution under your pillow- I hate guns. The number one killer of children in Arizona ages 17-19 is guns and I will never, ever, never think you have a legitimate reason to own an AR15. If you see someone who loves your AR15 and likes to stand around showing people your gun I think you are insane, insecure and a danger to society- we cannot and will not have a polite debate about weapons because I do not engage with crazy people.)
Thanks for continuing to nurse the “Flagstaff Agenda” along 😉