The Daily Agenda: We had a change of heart

Stick it to them, veto queen ... Fill those vacancies, supervisors ... And the best fictional autobiography $29.99 can buy.

Three months ago, we weighed the pros and cons of a bill to allow lawmakers to hide their addresses from public records, concluding that a decade ago, the idea would have outraged us, but these days, politics is a scary business and the bill might be justified. 

Yesterday, lawmakers sent that bill to the governor. She should veto it.

Our change of heart comes for a few reasons. Republican Sen. Wendy Rogers has once again shown that lawmakers cannot be trusted to live in their districts. And her attempt to punish a reporter for investigating where she lives drives home the importance of ensuring that voters are picking their legislators and not the other way around. 

While we’re not often sympathetic to lawmakers, it’s an important, if terrible, job that has grown increasingly dangerous in recent years. Lawmakers shouldn’t have to fear for the safety of their families. 

So when Republican Sen. T.J. Shope proposed Senate Bill 1061 to allow lawmakers to shield their addresses from the public, we gave the bill some benefit of the doubt. Sure, candidates will take advantage of it to run in districts they don’t represent, we thought, but they already do that. And nobody has been kicked out of the Legislature for not living in their district since 2010, despite some pretty clear-cut cases. 

At the time, Shope told us he had been talking to Secretary of State Adrian Fontes about an amendment to mandate the office check if candidates are actually registered to vote at their given address. The idea was their addresses would still be kept from the public, but someone would at least do a cursory check that they live there. 

But that’s not in the final draft of the bill. Shope told us that Fontes said he believes he has all the authority he needs. Fontes said he thinks there was a miscommunication somewhere, and he’s not planning to step up oversight of ensuring politicians live in their districts. 

“If they give me the job, I’ll do it,” he told us yesterday. “But we never talked specifically about regulating legislators’ addresses.” 

If lawmakers want to shield their addresses from public scrutiny, they need to add some layer of oversight to ensure they live where they say, a requirement under state law that far too many abuse or break. SB1061 doesn’t add any oversight.

Worse, the bill would make it illegal to post lawmakers’ addresses on the internet. Anyone who remembers Joe Arpaio will remember how that law can be abused. 

The unfortunate casualty of a veto here would be the elections officials who would be eligible for the address confidentiality program under the bill. They deserve a stand-alone bill and the added peace of mind of not having their addresses readily available to any weirdo with a keyboard. And unlike lawmakers, there’s no good reason for the public to know where they live. 

But the bill that’s heading to the governor would embolden carpetbaggers like Rogers to lie about their addresses and empower them to weaponize the law against members of the press who would hold them accountable. 

It has been 20 days since Republican Rep. Liz Harris was kicked out of the Legislature and 19 days since Democratic Sen. Raquel Terán resigned from office, leaving two vacant seats. 

And Republican Sen. J.D. Mesnard has some theories about why it’s taking so long.

The lawmaker told his colleagues in the Senate yesterday that he’s heard several rumors about why the board is taking its time picking a replacement for his seatmate, Harris.

One of the rumors is that they want to reject all three candidates that party activists nominated, he said. The law is clear that they must appoint one of the three, Mesnard said, but because the law doesn’t give them a deadline, he suggested lawmakers should write one. 

Another rumor is they want to deny the Legislature its missing members until lawmakers approve an extension to Prop 400, the county sales tax to fund transportation infrastructure that lawmakers have been holding hostage. 

“Again, just rumors, can’t know for sure,” he said, before noting that what’s not a rumor is the process is taking much longer than usual.

The board just started interviewing the three candidates that party activists chose to replace Harris yesterday, even though vacant seats have historically been filled within eight days on average, he said. This is the longest that a legislative seat has been left vacant during the legislative session in 56 years, according to Mesnard’s research.  

It’s either parks or shelters: Part of the proposed Phoenix budget would include funding for rangers to patrol city parks overnight, Christina Estes reports for KJZZ, noting that Phoenix City Councilwoman Ann O’Brien is concerned that when they start cleaning up the “Zone” downtown next week, it will push more people into parks around the city. Phoenix had previously approved a pilot program to hire some private security at selected parks. Meanwhile, officials broke ground on a planned $20 million transitional housing facility in Phoenix that will house up to 100 residents 50 years and older, though the project still doesn’t have a planned completion date, KTAR’s Suelena Rivera notes. 

There’s just so much to hate about them: A dozen Waymo autonomous Jaguars just parked in the road during last month’s First Friday event in downtown Phoenix, causing a traffic jam and vexing police who wanted them to move along, the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy writes. Arizona became a testing ground for the robots after Gov. Doug Ducey signed an executive order in his first term that opened the roads to the developing technology. The company says it “identified the software that contributed to this situation and made appropriate updates.”

Attorneys general always travel in packs: Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes joined a brief with more than 20 other state AGs urging the Court of Appeals to reject a Texas judge’s ruling and keep mifepristone legal, the Mirror’s Gloria Rebecca Gomez reports. The decision from a federal judge in Texas to ban the abortion drug is on hold as the legal battles play out. 

Get back to work: Without comment, the Arizona Supreme Court upheld Ducey's decision to cut federal unemployment benefits in order to spur people to get jobs during the pandemic, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer reports. A superior court judge had ruled it was illegal, but the state Court of Appeals and Supreme Court disagreed. That means about 100,000 Arizonans won’t receive the extra $2,400 they would have if Ducey hadn’t ended the program early. 

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There’s lot of dirty laundry in that closet: The Republic’s Robert Anglen spends a lot of ink diving into the family drama at My Sister’s Closet, an upscale consignment shop in Phoenix, as the three sisters behind the company fight it out in court and in public. 

“The high-stakes sister squabble is playing out in public and private arenas, with each side enlisting the courts and law enforcement agencies as proxies in their escalating efforts to discredit the other.”

A wet winter means more water fights in spring: With the massive snowfall in the Rocky Mountains this winter, Arizona’s lakes will once again be on the rise, AZFamily’s Whitney Clark reports. Hydrologists expect Lake Powell to get to 43% full from the current 24% and expect Lake Mead to climb from 29% to 31% full. Separately, Mayes is stepping on gubernatorial turf in her recent letter telling the Arizona Department of Water Resources, an executive agency, what to do, Substacker Robert Robb writes, saying she’s using faulty legal reasoning to “inappropriately micromanage” the state agency. And along the U.S.-Mexico border, activists from Humane Borders will continue receiving $30,000 from Pima County to place water stations in the desert for border crossers after the board of supervisors voted to continue its longstanding support of the program, Jorge Encinas writes in the Green Valley News. Finally, farmers worry that they’ve got a target on their backs as the West’s water crunch continues, but Arizona needs to put up a united front in interstate water negotiations. To bring farmers into the fold, policymakers need to ensure they have long-term stability, Joanna Allhands writes in the Republic. 

“Farmers are going to use a lot of water, even if most are already using it efficiently. That’s because plants require a lot of water to grow — more than homes and a lot of businesses. That doesn’t mean all farming is a waste of our precious resources,” Allhands writes.

Building the dang fence: More than two years after President Joe Biden abruptly stopped construction on the border wall, tractors are back in action near Nogales, where Angela Gervasi reports that construction crews are filling in gaps in the fencing ahead of the end of Title 42. 

Incorporation is overrated: A group of citizens in San Tan Valley is looking into incorporating as a real town, though it’s not the first time areas in the far East Valley have considered incorporation and not pulled it off, Pinal Central notes. 

Today’s bill is an obscure amendment on a 1999 bill that is causing all sorts of trouble 24 years later. 

Lawmakers are still bickering over how and whether to send a question to the ballot in Maricopa County to replace or extend the soon-to-expire Prop 400, which funds transportation projects in Maricopa County. 

Why do Arizona lawmakers have any say in whether Maricopa County can call an election to fund transportation, you ask?

Well, the Republic’s Mary Jo Pitzl explains the backstory of the little amendment from 1999 that put lawmakers in charge of approving special elections in Maricopa County, even though it’s not required in any other county.

We’re pretty thrilled about our next book report!