Earlier this year, anyone emailing Democratic Rep. Mariana Sandoval’s office received an automatic reply warning them not to expect a response anytime soon.
She had been without an assistant for more than a year, the reply said, so was unable to schedule appointments, hold in-person meetings or keep up with emails. If constituents needed a prompt response, Sandoval suggested they take it up with House Speaker Steve Montenegro.
House leadership has broad power over the day-to-day workplace affairs that can make a lawmaker’s life easier or harder — assistant assignments, office space and even parking spots. But internal emails exchanged among House staff last year suggest Sandoval’s lack of an assistant wasn’t just a petty act of political punishment.
Since taking office in 2023, Sandoval has burned through five assigned assistants, according to internal House emails we received as part of a public records request.
Those emails show a string of breakdowns between Sandoval and her staff, including two assistants who House staff said came to them crying over Sandoval’s treatment.
Rep. Mariana Sandoval’s automatic reply to an email we sent her on May 12, 2026.
If you’ve ever called or emailed your state lawmaker, chances are your message first landed with an administrative assistant.
In the House, lawmakers rely on a team of roughly 45 assistants to field constituent outreach, manage schedules and submit lawmakers’ reimbursement requests. And according to salary data we received last month, they make an average of about $55,000 a year.
Since most lawmakers have jobs outside the Capitol — and plenty to juggle when they’re there — those assistants are a vital link between lawmakers and the people they represent.
But while Sandoval implied her lack of an assistant is the result of a deliberate refusal by Republican House leadership, Montenegro’s office said her staffing problem is self-inflicted.
“After multiple attempts to provide Rep. Sandoval with an assistant, the House determined that a traditional direct supervisory arrangement was not the best fit,” House GOP spokesman Andrew Wilder told us in a statement. “Access to House staff is a privilege afforded to all members who treat staff with dignity and respect.”
We obtained an email circulated among House staff on Feb. 5, 2025, that recounts Sandoval’s succession of five assistants — and describes repeated conflicts with nearly all of them.
The arrangement with Sandoval’s first assistant, assigned to her in 2023, initially appeared to be going well, according to an email written by Montenegro’s assistant Jana Babel. But the assistant later came to Babel’s office and said Sandoval had begun to get upset with her and was “really belittling her in front of her seatmates.”
The assistant declined Babel’s offer to intervene, he wrote, because she feared confronting Sandoval would make the treatment worse.
About a month later, the assistant returned to Babel’s office in tears, joined by another colleague. The colleague told Babel that Sandoval had been “verbally abusive and belittling” the assistant regularly, but that the treatment that day had been “extremely bad.”
House staff reassigned the assistant and gave Sandoval another. But Sandoval and the second assistant “did not work together well,” Babel wrote, so a third assistant temporarily took over.
“(Sandoval) was not happy with her at all, and (the third assistant) didn’t want to work for her either,” Babel said. “Sandoval went without an assistant for a couple of weeks with just floaters filling in.”
Sandoval appeared to get along with the fourth assistant, Babel wrote, but that assistant left after about three weeks for another job.
The fifth assignment proved to be the breaking point.
Babel said she had already run out of assistants willing to work for Sandoval, but eventually found one more person willing to try.
But Sandoval was “not happy with her either.”
“(The fifth assistant) came to me at noon and started crying saying she couldn’t work for her anymore. She stated she had made some mistakes, and that (Sandoval) was putting her down in front of other assistants,” Babel wrote. “This wasn’t the first time (but she said) that it was getting really bad.”
In one instance, the assistant brought Babel travel reimbursement forms that had not received the required approval and said Sandoval had told her the additional sign-off was unnecessary. In another, the House sergeant at arms confronted the assistant after Sandoval allegedly instructed her to bring a guest onto the House floor without permission.
Since House leadership removed the fifth assistant from Sandoval’s office in February 2025, she hasn’t been assigned a replacement.
The staffing turmoil comes as Sandoval fights to keep her seat in a four-way Democratic primary for the two House seats in Southern Arizona’s Legislative District 23, one of the state’s few truly competitive districts.
Asked about the allegations in the emails, Sandoval sent us a statement explaining she had not previously understood the extent of the concerns:
“This feedback from assistants had not been fully shared with me prior to this and is difficult to read. At no point did any of the assistants or their supervisors ever raise concerns with me directly or schedule a meeting to discuss any issues or hear my perspective. I would have welcomed that conversation and feedback. I hold myself to high professional standards, and it’s disappointing to fall short of that. I am assertive and have a direct management style, but I’ve had excellent relationships with colleagues in the past, and I’ve never intentionally sought to hurt anyone’s feelings or diminish their work. I apologize to anyone whom I’ve worked with who did not have a good experience. I appreciate and respect everything that our House assistants do for us.”
Before we asked about the allegations, Sandoval had attributed her lack of a dedicated assistant to politics.
House leadership removed her from the Ways and Means Committee in March, a move Democrats described as “apparent retaliation for removing bills from the House floor consent agenda.” Democratic Rep. Aaron Marquez was also removed from his post on the Public Safety and Law Enforcement Committee.
While Democrats don’t have much power in the GOP-controlled Legislature, they can slow proceedings down by pulling bills off the consent calendar, forcing bills that could have advanced as a group to be heard one by one, which Sandoval did.
“While I understand House leadership has broad discretion over committee assignments, it is difficult not to wonder whether my removal from the Ways and Means Committee and lack of assistant assignment may have been influenced by partisan considerations,” Sandoval said.
“I do think the Speaker’s denial of an assistant for a House member for the past 17 months is arbitrary, unfair, and should be reversed.”
Wins and losses: A federal judge blocked a provision of Arizona’s elections manual that would have banned people from wearing clothing that could intimidate voters, the Arizona Mirror’s Caitlin Sievers reports. The decision was a blow to Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, but Judge Michael Liburdi did allow a ban on electioneering if it’s loud enough to be heard at the door of a polling place. Liburdi also allowed election officials to kick out observers from political parties if they make repeated frivolous challenges to poll workers. Meanwhile, LUCHA is training volunteers to be election observers, with a particular focus on what to do if ICE shows up at the polls, per the Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy.
Stay off the prediction markets: Gov. Katie Hobbs signed an executive order banning state employees from using confidential information to make money on prediction markets like Kalshi, Veronica Stracqualursi reports for AZFamily. But the ban has limits. It doesn’t apply to the judicial branch, the Corporation Commission, staff at the Legislature or state agencies that are headed by elected officials.
Post-Platner backlash: Progressive candidate Kai Newkirk got hit with some political shrapnel from the Graham Platner scandal in his run for the Democratic nomination in the 4th Congressional District, the Republic’s Laura Gersony reports. The Young Democrats of Arizona and a prominent leader of the Democratic Socialists in Phoenix pulled their support of Newkirk, apparently due to a 2019 news story about his past relationships (one of the authors of the 2019 story later said it was inaccurate and the story was taken down). But the University of Arizona College Democrats are sticking with Newkirk, who they called a “progressive fighter.” And, in an odd side note, the UA group added a dig at the Young Democrats of Arizona.
“We encourage the Young Democrats of Arizona to practice transparency moving forward and remind them to recognize the power that their voices hold in our movement,” the UA group said in a statement.
Birds of a feather: In the race for the GOP nomination in Arizona’s 5th Congressional District, President Donald Trump made sure it was clear that he endorsed Mark Lamb, the Republic’s Robert Anglen and Dan Nowicki report. Some Arizona Republicans backed away from Lamb after the Republic reported he sexted women and tried to intimidate at least one of them to keep quiet. But Trump isn’t one of those Republicans. He posted on Friday that Lamb was a “MAGA Warrior” who “WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!”
Sharpening their knives: Now that it’s looking like U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs is going to win the GOP nomination for governor, Hobbs and Biggs are testing out their arguments for the general election, per KTAR’s David Iversen. Hobbs says Biggs hasn’t accomplished much in his political career and he’s often a fringe “no” vote on bipartisan bills in Congress. Biggs says his record in the Arizona Senate and Congress shows he isn’t too partisan to win a statewide race in Arizona. He gave the examples of working with former U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (a Democrat who went independent) and former U.S. Sen. John McCain (a Republican), as well as collaborating with Democratic U.S. Reps. Jerry Nadler and Pramila Jayapal.
Robert Gawlitza, the character at the center of a dispute over a $12.8 million lottery ticket, finally spoke out about the surreal situation in which he finds himself.
We’ve dipped into the story several times over the past few weeks, but for those who haven’t been following along, the quick-and-dirty version goes like this:
Gawlitza was managing a Circle K in Scottsdale last November. A customer walked in and bought $85 worth of lottery tickets. But they only had $60, so the rest of the tickets were left on the counter. The next morning, Gawlitza realized one of the tickets on the counter was a winner. He clocked out and bought the ticket.
Now, there’s a legal battle over whether he’s the lawful owner of the ticket.
But what’s got us chuckling is how Gawlitza reacted in the moment, per the account he gave to 12News.
It sounds a lot like how we’d react if all of a sudden we were holding $12.8 million in our hand.
“Is this real?” Gawlitza recalled thinking. “It’s like a numb feeling. You don’t know. Like, is this real in my hand?”