The Daily Agenda: The Zone needs more than lawsuits
The Daily Agenda: The Zone needs more than lawsuits
Elected officials should look out their windows at the mess they created ... We're No. 1 (in COVID-19 deaths) ... And this weed really stinks.
While business owners near the Phoenix homeless encampment scored a legal victory on Monday, the path to improve the Zone is far from clear.
In case you missed the news, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney ruled that the city must start enforcing laws and cleaning up the area. That includes clearing tents from the public rights of way, getting rid of biohazards like human waste and trash, and charging people who are breaking laws there.
Blaney set a deadline of July 10 for the city to show progress on these measures, which conveniently comes right in the middle of summer, the most dangerous time of year for people to be living on the streets of an increasingly scorching city.
The plight of the business owners, in particular, caught national attention from a recent New York Times profile of longtime Capitol lunch spot Old Station Subs. There’s no doubt owning a business near the Zone is a massive challenge; so is being homeless. The two groups are pitted against each other, despite both being left behind by the elected officials who should be helping out.
The ballooning homelessness crisis should have never gotten this bad in the first place. While the number of people living on the streets has certainly increased over the past couple years as housing costs in Phoenix skyrocketed, the problem isn’t new.
And neither is the complete lack of political will to solve it. Phoenix’s encampment is uniquely situated right between all the entities that could do something about it: the Capitol is just blocks away, as are the county and city headquarters. Yet finger-pointing has remained the main way our elected officials handle the crisis.
The truth is, everyone is to blame. State lawmakers continue to punt on real reforms to housing, a critical part of addressing homelessness, and need to better fund programs that give cities and counties the money to make meaningful investments in shelters and affordable housing. The city has allowed the area to languish, neglecting the people living on the streets and the businesses in the area.
It should have never taken a lawsuit from businesses to compel action, but the lawsuit layers onto other legal issues that now make any kind of response more complex. The city told media outlets it’s still working to understand the ruling and how it will respond.
First, a federal court ruling prevents cities from enforcing anti-camping laws if there aren’t enough shelter beds. Blaney shot down the City of Phoenix’s claims that this ruling made it unable to evict people from the area, saying the city hadn’t proven that all the people camping in the Zone were unable to find shelter.
Next, the city is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, in part because of sweeps to clean the Zone that led to people’s belongings being taken or thrown away.
And then there’s the recent injunction in a lawsuit brought by the ACLU that prohibits the city from enforcing a camping ban and seizing belongings, limiting the kinds of sweeps that can be done in the area.
Simply calling on the city to scrap the Zone in a few months doesn’t resolve the problem, and the logistics of such moves leave us with lots of questions. How will the city ensure people’s rights are kept intact, knowing another lawsuit could arise from how Phoenix handles Blaney’s ruling? Could the city erect a campground for people experiencing homelessness, complete with bathrooms? And where would that go? And how would the businesses and people living nearby respond? The ruling leaves a pile-up of questions with no easy answers.
One thing is clear: We need more money to help the people living in the Zone. We need treatment options for people dealing with addiction and mental health crises. We need political leaders who work comprehensively and quickly to respond to a humanitarian crisis. It’s long past time for action.
Veto pen stays sharp: As expected, Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed a bill that would have ended city grocery taxes. In her veto letter, Hobbs said the measure would have led to potential service cuts to residents while not saving people much money. She also vetoed legislation that would have made it illegal for Arizona banks to refuse to work with gun companies, saying the bill would result in banks leaving the state.
Timing is everything: Gubernatorial spokeswoman Josselyn Berry tweeted “Us when we see transphobes” along with a GIF of a woman holding a pistol in each hand hours after a trans woman shot up the private Christian school she formerly attended in Nashville, killing three 9-year-olds and three adults. Twitter removed the tweet for violating the platform’s terms late Tuesday night, but nobody in Hobbs’ office wanted to talk about it when the Republic’s Stacey Barchenger called.
A tall order: A group that wants to recall Republican Sen. Justine Wadsack said it will gather signatures throughout April and hopes to file signatures by May, the Arizona Capitol Times’ Camryn Sanchez reports. Some of the organizers are Wadsack’s constituents, while others live elsewhere in the state. The group, whose website is sackwadsack.com, needs to collect about 33,000 valid signatures from registered voters in her district.
Take a bow, COVID-19 deniers: Arizona has the country’s highest death rate for COVID-19, when adjusted for age and comorbidities, Axios Phoenix’s Jessica Boehm reports, based on a new Lancet study of COVID-19 deaths. With a death rate of 581 deaths per 100,000 people, Arizona’s rate aligned with some of the hardest-hit places in the world.
Meet the new boss: Maricopa County will have a new county manager, with assistant manager Jen Pokorski being promoted to the top spot, the Republic’s Sasha Hupka reports. Current county manager Joy Rich will retire on April 7. Pokorski is a longtime county employee who has held various roles in county government since she started there in 2005.
What’s going on in Congress?: U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs got corrected on C-SPAN for erroneously claiming that no one involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection had been convicted of seditious conspiracy (four Oath Keepers have been). Freshman U.S. Rep. Eli Crane called the World Health Organization a “corrupt pawn of Communist China." And losing Republican Congressional candidate Elijah Norton, in legal papers, took issue with his opponent’s campaign’s use of emojis like the peach, high heels and lipstick, which were used to paint Norton as gay.
It’s never going to end: Before the Maricopa County Superior Court can again go over a signature verification claim Kari Lake made in a lawsuit over her gubernatorial loss, the Arizona Supreme Court will accept arguments on whether Lake should face sanctions for bringing the suit in the first place, Barchenger reports in the Republic. That means Lake’s case — and the probable fundraising she’s doing around it — will carry on for at least several more weeks.
No there there: The Senate Director Nominations Committee led by Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman banned nominees from using electronic devices during their hearings after rumors that nominees were getting texts from the governor’s office coaching them on how to respond. But text records obtained by Substacker Dillon Rosenblatt show that the Governor’s Office sent just a few texts, mostly telling nominees they did great.
Drugs are everywhere, always: Opioids and other drugs are getting into prisons, with some inmates overdosing in recent months, KTAR’s Taylor Kinnerup and Taylor Tasler report. Hobbs told the outlet that, while the idea of drugs getting into prisons isn’t new, it’s something her administration wants to address, along with a host of other corrections-related issues.
Women at the helm: For the first time, the Arizona Education Association, the longrunning teachers union, is led by all women, ABC15’s Nick Ciletti reports. The group was founded in 1892, but has not had women in all its top leadership spots — president, vice president and treasurer — since then.
The clock will run out: Though it hasn’t been officially called off, Hobbs said it’s unlikely that an execution of Aaron Gunches could happen on April 6, the date set by the Arizona Supreme Court in an earlier execution warrant, the Associated Press reports.
We didn’t start the fire: The rain has been good and all, but it likely won’t prevent a busy fire season, the state’s fire officials and Hobbs said in the annual wildfire forecast this week. Most fires are started by people, and long-term drought conditions make them burn longer and more erratically, officials said.
No bill ever dies: After the death of his broad housing reform bill, Republican Sen. Steve Kaiser said he’s still working to revive several elements of his broad proposal, including provisions that would require cities to allow casitas, greenlighting duplexes and triplexes and adding more manufactured housing, Bob Christie reports for Capitol Media Services. Broader preemptions to city zoning won’t be brought back because they don’t have the support of most lawmakers and face fierce opposition from cities and towns.
Fail, fail again: Nogales’ housing authority, which manages city-owned low-income housing units, failed, and then failed even worse, on federal assessments, the Nogales International’s Angela Gervasi reports. The authority got a failing mark in 2022, then didn’t submit a mandatory audit on time, lowering its score even further, resulting in the agency now being categorized as “troubled” by federal housing officials. The feds want the city to come up with a recovery plan for the agency.
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