The Daily Agenda: Will we ever See the Money?
The Daily Agenda: Will we ever See the Money?
Hobbs hands off the mess she inherited… Don't schedule a vacation until August ... And watch out for the bees.
More than seven years ago, Secretary of State Michele Reagan promised to build a sophisticated, state-of-the-art campaign finance system that would “revolutionize” the way people view campaign spending reports.
The new system would “blow away” all rivals, she said at the time, by shining a light on dark money and housing all local campaign finance reports at one centralized location. And best of all, it would cost no additional money, her office said.
“The public has no idea [who is influencing whom] unless they want to travel to 200-plus cities and 15 counties and go pull paper records,” Reagan said in 2015. “If you want to get a full, true idea of an individual lobbyist or anyone of who they’re really influencing, you can’t get that right now.”
As any Arizona campaign finance geek can tell you, you still can’t get that information.
Now, the “See the Money” campaign finance portal boondoggle is encroaching on a third secretary of state’s administration. And just like his predecessors, Democrat Adrian Fontes is hoping to fix the system so it can live up to its promise.
See the Money finally launched, two years behind schedule, as a buggy “beta” website. The site cost at least $1 million.
In 2019, in her first year as secretary of state, Katie Hobbs declared the system a failure. But she pledged that during her tenure, she would get the system on track.
“It doesn’t work, and we want it to work,” Hobbs said in 2019.
Hobbs did make some technical fixes to the system to appease one reporter who frequently complained, Hobbs’ spokeswoman Murphy Hebert reminded us yesterday1. When Hobbs finally took down the old campaign finance website in 2020, which many politicos had relied on since the flawed See the Money portal was born, the secretary of state again pledged to whip See the Money into shape.
Still, it never lived up to its initial promise, Hebert acknowledged. The office got bogged down in 2020 election conspiracies and defending democracy and all the other madness of the past few years, and it didn’t make as much progress on See the Money as Hobbs would have liked, she said.
Now See the Money is Fontes’ problem. And the new secretary of state is just as determined to fix the failed campaign finance portal as his predecessors, he told us yesterday. But he’s running into the same problems.
“This agency has been starved for decades,” he said. “I'm a big fan of disclosure and transparency. I think we could have had a very robust system, but you'd have to put the resources into it on the front side to get the product you want on the back side.”
Although he’s still settling in, turning See the Money into the one-stop shop for state and local campaign finance data that Reagan envisioned is on his priority list, Fontes said. So is updating the state’s lobbyist expenditure portal2 — the site that lobbyists use to report taking a lawmaker to dinner or on a junket. But he'll still need lawmakers to allocate the money necessary to turn See the Money into something that actually allows the public to follow campaign spending.
“I'm hoping we'll be able to make it happen quickly. But quickly is a relative term when you're dealing with government projects like this,” he said.
Good times were had by all: Gov. Katie Hobbs’ budget guru presented the executive budget proposal to the Joint Appropriations Committee today, and it, predictably, didn’t go well. Republicans hammered Hobbs’ budget director Sarah Brown over the governor’s plan to roll back their school voucher expansion and generally derided Hobbs’ spending plan while threatening a government shutdown. The video of the meeting isn’t uploaded yet, but the following tweets just about sum it up.
Another loss for Kelli: The Court of Appeals, just like the Mohave County Superior Court, rejected AZGOP Chair Kelli Ward’s lawsuit arguing that Arizona’s mail-in ballot system is unconstitutional. The state GOP was represented by new lawmaker Alexander Kolodin. The AZ Law blog has the filing.
New director, who dis?: Hobbs announced her picks to lead the Departments of Public Safety, Corrections and Revenue yesterday. Jeff Glover, the former police chief in Tempe, will lead the Department of Public Safety; Ryan Thornell, the former deputy commissioner of the Maine Department of Corrections, will lead the state’s prisons; and Rob Woods will stay on to lead the Department of Revenue.
He vouches for vouchers: Senate President Warren Petersen gabbed with KTAR’s Mike Broomhead yesterday about his plans to cancel cities’ food and rental tax, the potential of passing another “skinny” baseline budget, whether lawmakers will lift the school spending cap and Hobbs’ plans to cancel the expansion of Arizona’s school vouchers or ESA program. Meanwhile, a group of parents joined legislators at the Capitol to praise school vouchers and knock Hobbs’ plans.
“It would be a huge debacle and mistake for her to eliminate the ESA program because you have a ton of minorities and a ton of low-income people — you have a lot of her base that benefits from ESAs,” he said.
2023 is over: There’s already been a spate of polling in the potential November 2024 U.S. Senate matchup between incumbent Kyrsten Sinema, Democratic Congressman Ruben Gallego and former TV news anchor Kari Lake. Two recent surveys find that Lake could narrowly pull it off against Gallego in a three-way race, and that Sinema’s support is in the teens. Of course, the potential matchup is still 22 months out and almost 20% of voters are unsure of who they’d back.
Lawmakers really do keep getting younger: A bipartisan crew of lawmakers wants to lower the minimum age to serve in the Legislature from 25 to 18, saying Arizona has one of the highest age requirements to serve of any state. The age is set in the state Constitution, so even if House Concurrent Resolution 2004 passes the Legislature, it’ll still have to go to the voters, reporter Howie Fischer notes.
Even the losers win: Spence Rogers, the nephew of Republican state Sen. Wendy Rogers, made some decent cash helping Mark Finchem lose his campaign for secretary of state, Issue 1, a D.C.-based nonprofit organization notes, in its report on “Who Profited from Election Deniers.” Finchem was the top-spending election-denying secretary of state candidate, and the main profiteer from his conspiracy-ridden campaign was Go Right Strategies, which Spence owns.
“The $1.5 million in payments to Go Right Strategies account for 76% of Finchem’s campaign expenditures — making the firm the top recipient of his campaign’s spending,” Issue 1 notes.
Regulation at the speed of business: A handful of professional licensing boards got grilled by lawmakers after the Auditor General’s Office noted that they do a very bad job of investigating citizens’ complaints, the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy writes. The boards all said they needed more staff to quickly and efficiently investigate and process complaints.
More diverse: The Arizona Legislature has more women and people of color than at any time in history, Ray Stern writes in a piece in the Republic that includes some graphics. More than half of the Senate is female, while a few new Republicans of color were elected.
Stay on Earth: Space is dangerous and bad for humans, astronaut Scott Kelly and his slightly more earthbound twin brother, U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, helped prove when the non-elected twin went to space for a year. The Washington Post has a short story with a cool presentation about some of the symptoms of space travel that Kelly and other astronauts experience, including, “Puffy Face Bird Leg Phenomenon.” It’s part of a package of stories about The New Space Age.
Picking sides in the Dem war: Candidates to become the next chair of the Arizona Democratic Party attended a Zoom forum with the Democrats of Greater Tucson Monday. There’s something of an internal struggle brewing as Steve Gallardo, a former lawmaker and current Maricopa County Supervisor, has the backing of Gov. Katie Hobbs, while Yolanda Bejarano, a union organizer, has the blessing of U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and Attorney General Kris Mayes.
Devastating: An Arizona father whose son died while under the care of the Arizona Department of Child Safety wants answers on what happened, the Associated Press’ Felicia Fonseca reports. Richard Blodgett’s 9-year-old son, who had Type 1 diabetes, entered state custody after Blodgett was jailed on drug charges. By the time Blodgett could leave jail to see his son, the boy was dead. Blodgett suspects the boy’s diabetes wasn’t managed properly while he was in DCS care.
Scary times: A Republican legislative candidate in New Mexico began shooting up the homes of Democratic lawmakers around Albuquerque after he lost his election in 2022 and declared it “rigged” against him. Police say he also paid other people to shoot at the homes as part of a criminal conspiracy.
If you fall off the horse…: After losing by more than 12 percentage points to Democratic U.S. Rep. Greg Stanton, Republican Kelly Cooper is already back on the campaign trail, running against Stanton again in 2024, he announced yesterday.
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