The Oprah budget

The GOP slush fund returns … $1 prisons … And we’re sorry, Robbie.

After burning through a roughly $2 billion surplus in 2023, Arizona state lawmakers had to make drastic cuts last year to get the state back in the black.

But it seems Republican lawmakers failed to learn a lesson from their “slush fund budgeting” process.

Already this year, Republican lawmakers are again pushing the idea of handing out $12 million or more to each Republican Senator who votes for the budget — and allowing those lawmakers to direct that cash to their own pet projects.

Republican Sen. John Kavanagh, the chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, sent an email to his Republican colleagues last month announcing the state has an estimated $750 million one-time surplus, and suggesting that he wants to approve a “member-driven budget.”

“(E)ach senator will have an estimated $12 million one-time to allocate towards budget items of their choosing,” he wrote in an email we got our hands on.

That’s not including the expenditures that members of the lower chamber or the Governor’s Office would put into the budget.

The budget that lawmakers approved in 2023 included $2 billion in what was dubbed “pet projects” for Republican lawmakers to use as they wanted. That totaled around $20 million to $30 million per lawmaker who supported the budget.

That money could have saved a lot of important projects lawmakers cut to get rid of the resulting deficit last year.

But allowing lawmakers to fund their own pet projects was something of a political necessity. In a divided government, it was a way to garner buy-in from lawmakers who otherwise might not have supported it. A porked-up budget was certainly better than the likely alternative: no budget at all.

Gov. Katie Hobbs’ approval of the 2023 slush fund spending drew the ire of legislative Democrats, who felt like they were left out of negotiations.

In 2023, several Republicans put their budget allowances together for one-time family tax rebates which, in an ironic turn of events, ended up being subject to taxes. And two Republican representatives were hit with a lawsuit for using their parts of the pork on the Prescott rodeo.

Now, Kavanagh wants to do it all over again.

Kavanagh told us the $12 million per GOP lawmaker is “just a suggestion that's been floated around” and it’s based on “back of the envelope calculations.”

“It doesn't have legs yet, not to say it won’t slither in,” he said.

Kavanagh noted that spending requests are still subject to negotiations with Hobbs, who would likely nix any radically right spending priorities, just as legislative Republicans might balk at far-left funding for things like abortion centers. And he said lawmakers can pool their money together for bigger projects that benefit the entire state.

But Democratic Sen. Mitzi Epstein called Kavanagh’s proposed budgeting process “Oprah budgeting,” as in: “You get $12 million, you get $12 million, you get $12 million!”

“It's wrong to try to plan a budget by just doling out dollar amounts to each legislator. The right way to do it is to use collaborative skills and listen to the 90 people who represent all the people of the state,” she said.

Plus, when only Republicans get extra funds, only areas represented by Republicans benefit, Epstein pointed out. Twelve legislative districts have only Democratic legislators representing them at the Capitol.

For what it’s worth, some of the GOP-issued projects in 2023 went to much-needed infrastructure projects. Others went to perhaps less worthy causes, like the Arizona State University women’s wrestling team and a horse racing track. The ordeal raised concerns about violating the state’s gift clause, which prohibits spending taxpayer dollars on things without a clear public benefit.

And the funds were seen as a shameless ploy to force Republicans to come to a consensus and pass the state budget.

Kavanagh, however, argues it’s just a good tactic to get members of a divided government on board. And since the budgeting process plays out behind closed doors, it makes lawmakers feel more involved when they have their own money to spend. Republican lawmakers, that is.

“​​In the traditional budget situation, you wind up having a couple of holdout members who wind up getting their little $12-or-more million dollar project to get the budget passed, which is probably less democratic than spreading the good around,” he said.

The Arizona Agenda is a reader-supported publication that costs one one-millionth of the price of your state lawmaker’s pet project. And you have three state lawmakers!

Support local news to reduce political pork.

We’re quick to label lawmakers’ priorities “pet projects” and call their spending allotments “slush funds.”

But not all pork is bad, as we noted back in 2023, when we spotted a string of stories in local papers showing how critical and long-overdue many of these “pet projects” were to the local communities.¹

Here’s a sample of 2023’s “pet projects” from the archives:

• Lake Havasu got $35 million to build a second bridge and alleviate traffic over the historic London Bridge — a project that has been a priority for the town for years. The budget also ponied up $9 million to fix up substations for the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office, which the local sheriff said were becoming liabilities because of the snakes, mice and scorpions that had taken up residence there, Havasu News’ MacKenzie Dexter reports. And that’s not to mention the funding for local highways and water recharge basins.

• Peoria cops got a bunch of new tools, and the city got $10 million for wells and water infrastructure, freeing up city funds that would have paid for the upgrades, the Daily Independent’s Philip Haldiman reports.

• In Tombstone and Huachuca City, four school buildings got new roofs from the money earmarked for school improvements, the Herald/Review’s Dana Cole reports.

• In Pinal County, the budget upgraded outdated and dangerous highways in areas that have seen explosive population growth in recent years with little state investment to match, Pinal Central’s Kimlye Stager reports.

A sign of things to come: As the Trump administration gears up for an immigration crackdown, state Sen. John Kavanagh wants to use closed prisons to house undocumented immigrants taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Republic’s Ray Stern reports. Kavanagh pointed to two facilities that could be rented to ICE for $1 per year, one in Marana and one in Florence. Even if the Trump administration doesn’t need them, Kavanagh said people detained under the voter-approved Prop 314 could be housed at the facilities (as long as the U.S. Supreme Court says a similar measure in Texas is actually constitutional). The looming crackdown is also spooking school officials in Phoenix and across the country, the Republic’s Madeleine Parrish reports. Schools say they don’t want to voluntarily assist ICE and they’re also training staff on how to respond to inquiries from the immigration agency. Schools are generally considered off-limits under a 1982 Supreme Court decision. For now.

Less crossing, more convicting: Federal prosecutors in Arizona set a record for border-crossing prosecutions last year, Arizona Public Media’s Danyelle Khmara reports. The rise in prosecutions, which reached 10,500 last year, is kind of counter-intuitive. It’s actually the result of fewer people crossing the border illegally, which gave Border Patrol agents more time to process cases for prosecution.

Paid volunteer: The treasurer of the Arizona Democratic Party is in hot water for paying himself $66,000 in party funds to answer financial questions from party members, the Arizona Capitol Times’ Kiera Riley reports. Treasurer Rick McGuire fielded nearly 4,000 questions last year from county and legislative party organizations. Vice Chair Will Knight wants an audit, but Chair Yolanda Bejarano says the party doesn’t have the resources to “placate unreasonable claims.”

You finished with that?: As Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes moves ahead with her investigation of the fake electors scheme from the 2020 election, she wants a peek at the case file from special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation, the Arizona Mirror’s Caitlin Sievers reports. Mayes had already asked for the file, but Smith’s office said they weren’t ready to share it. Now that Smith released his report this week, Mayes is taking another crack at it.

Cave politicians: Behind closed doors, Tempe officials disparaged city residents who opposed the new arena for the Arizona Coyotes, Phoenix New Times’ TJ L’Heureux reports. The supposedly private meeting in December 2022, one of three meetings held around that time, was actually recorded. Tempe resident Mario Martinez used a records request to get the recording, which showed city officials calling arena opponents “cave people” and said one ringleader was a “crazy uncle.” Who knows what else officials said at the two other meetings? City officials didn’t come up with recordings for them.

Democratic Rep. Stacey Travers filed a bill to place a monument on the Arizona Capitol lawn honoring journalist Don Bolles, who was murdered by a car bomb in 1976 for his investigative reporting into organized crime and corruption.

We hear Republican Rep. Selina Bliss is about to file a bill as well.

This will be the third year of trying to get the memorial done after Hank started the initiative during the 2023 legislative session. And because we’re not formally involved this year, it may have its best chance of passing yet!

The first go-around, the bill died in the Senate after Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman refused to put it up for a hearing. The same thing happened last year, even after Rep. Alex Kolodin threw his support at the memorial in the name of inspiring journalists to “do real reporting.”

This year, Hoffman is still in charge of the Senate Government Committee, where the Bolles bill will likely end up.

But we’ve got a new tool to help our grassroots lobbying efforts: Wolfpack.

Click the button to try it out.

We’d like to extend our deepest apologies to Robbie Sherwood, who made a joke that — like the drone we falsely alleged he piloted — went right over our heads.

The House Democrats’ communications director joked with the press corp that it was his drone circling a Freedom Caucus press conference on Monday. We later saw said drone suspiciously following Sherwood as he walked into the Capitol Museum and made a hasty assumption.

Hey, it was a long day for two dipsticks.

1. Unfortunately, many of the projects highlighted in the 2023 coverage never actually got built because lawmakers had to cut or delay funding in 2024 because they overspent.