The House's Spring Break

They're just hitting pause to visit the Holy Land ... Chillin with the Chiltons ... And the family feud rages on.

Lawmakers have only a few months left to solve the state’s $2 billion budget deficit and deal with hundreds of high-stakes bills ranging from teacher pay to the state’s water supply.  

Yet almost a third of the state House is going on vacation next month, joining an all-expenses-paid junket to Israel that will shut down the House floor and most activity for a week.

Democratic Rep. Alma Hernandez is leading the trip and said the group paying for it — A New York-based nonprofit called itrek — is led by a close friend who approached her with the idea. Itrek is covering all expenses for flights and lodging for the group of ten Republicans and 7 Democrats. 

Lawmakers frequently travel on domestic and international junkets paid for by lobbying organizations, foreign governments, nonprofits or the state, but it’s pretty unheard of for them to dip out mid-year, especially with a looming budget shortfall and so much left on the legislative agendas. 

Hopefully, lawmakers’ paperwork doesn’t get left behind, as our art intern ChatGPT depicts.

In fact, taking breaks mid-year is usually frowned upon. Lawmakers are frequently reminded by legislative leaders to not schedule vacations, illnesses or deaths before July 1, the final date by which lawmakers must pass a budget. 

Almost every year, there’s some kind of minor crisis because some lawmaker is absent and their vote is needed to pass something.

But this spring break is leadership-approved, at least in the House.

House Speaker Ben Toma is also attending the March 6-10 trip, and although he confirmed his counterpart, Senate President Warren Petersen, was also invited, no senators are attending. Rumor at the Capitol is Petersen forbade it.

But Toma said he’s not worried about delaying progress in the House during spring break, because “We don't have as many bills from the Senate yet.” 

During the same week last year, the House scheduled four floor sessions, 13 committee meetings and caucus meetings for Republicans and Democrats. 

Toma noted that House committees will still be allowed to meet, even if the full chamber won’t be meeting. But considering the speaker, majority leader and the chairs of the Appropriations, Commerce, Ways and Means, Judiciary and Transportation and Infrastructure committees will all be in Israel, it’s safe to say not much will get done. 

Toma said his attendance has nothing to do with his candidacy in the crowded GOP primary for Arizona’s Congressional District 8. 

And yes, Israel does have ties to Arizona state policy, he said. 

“We have a trade office in Israel. We have clear economic reasons to be interested in what happens there,” he told us yesterday. “This is not my first trip. As a matter of fact, that's gonna be my third trip to Israel, for different reasons. So again, we have our interests. We have friends, we have colleagues. I think it's fair.” 

But some senators aren’t thrilled that their House colleagues are skipping work in the middle of the busy season. Republican Sen. TJ Shope, for example, wondered if lawmakers playing hooky would endanger any of his bills in the House.

State law bars legislators from taking junkets paid for by lobbyists unless the entire Legislature, a whole caucus, or a full committee is invited. But Hernandez said itrek is not a registered lobbying organization, it’s an educational nonprofit that usually takes graduate students on trips to Israel. 

Hernandez said she decided who was invited based on who she wanted to travel with, with priority for those who have never been to Israel, and she let Toma pick which Republicans to invite. She invited Senators, too, but said they weren’t able to break from the session to attend. 

  “I mean, personally, I feel that it's really important for people to be able to see for themselves,” she said. “We have a lot of bills that deal with what is currently going on. And I think it's important for them to be able to see that firsthand.” 

Borderline broke: Pima County is warning that when federal funding for housing and transportation of undocumented asylum seekers dries up next month, it will put a huge strain on Nogales and Douglas, where the migrants are being bused from, and also on Tucson, where they’re ending up, Lyda Longa reports for the Herald-Review. Meanwhile, two New York Times reporters spent a week on Jim Chilton’s ranch in Arivaca, reporting that the longtime family ranch has been “swallowed up in the madness of the border,” as a lot of desperate people seek asylum.

Don’t Arizona their New York: Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell started an odd beef with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is leading the prosecution of former President Donald Trump for the whole Stormy Daniels hush money thing, and is refusing to extradite a man arrested here who stands accused of murdering a woman in New York, per the New York Times. Mitchell said that given Bragg’s treatment of violent criminals, she should keep the suspect, who is also accused of stabbing an Arizona woman, though a spokesman later said state law requires the office to finish its case before extraditing the suspect.

“New York’s murder rate is less than half that of Phoenix, Ariz.,” Bragg’s spokesman responded. 

Not just signing bills: As part of a “nationwide burst” of judicial appointments, President Joe Biden is set to nominate two women to the U.S. District Court for Arizona: U.S. Magistrate Judge Angela Martinez and Arizona assistant U.S. Attorney Krissa Lanham, per the Republic’s Ronald Hansen. And while they’ll need confirmation from the U.S. Senate, state judges usually don’t, which is why appointing judges is the “quiet way Democrats hope to expand their power at the state level,” per the New York Times, which notes that Gov. Katie Hobbs has already appointed 15 Arizona Superior Court judges. 

Not a good time to be broke: Before Kari Lake blackmailed him out of the position of AZGOP Chair, Jeff DeWit did not save the Arizona Republican Party from its financial freefall, Jim Small reports (with some good graphics!) in the Arizona Mirror. 

“Both the AZGOP’s state and federal campaign accounts are in a bad way, putting Republicans behind the eight ball precisely as the 2024 election is beginning to heat up,” Small writes.

It is their land: Federal energy officials shot down an application for a controversial hydropower permit on the Navajo Nation in Northern Arizona and say they will no longer approve projects on tribal land if the local tribes oppose it, a seemingly big shift from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that Indigenous advocates and conservation groups are happy about, KUNC’s Alex Hager reports. 

Don’t study math at UA: The University of Arizona’s budget crunch reached the pages of the New York Times, where Jack Healy notes that locals fear the fiasco damaged the university’s reputation and the needed cuts will come on the backs of low-paid employees who prop up the local economy. Meanwhile, the Daily Star’s Ellie Wolfe notes that the finger-pointing continues, as faculty pushed back against claims that their overspending is to blame, noting the colleges have no say over tuition discounts and strategic spending decisions. 

State Revenues continued their year-over-year decline last month, per the Joint Legislative Budget Committee monthly fiscal highlights, though January revenues were actually slightly above the newly revised JLBC baseline estimates. 

Meaning the budget situation is bad, but slightly less bad than the most pessimistic estimates. Lower property tax, gambling taxes and interest collections are dragging down state revenues, per JLBC’s latest monthly fiscal highlights, while sales taxes and individual income taxes are up slightly. 

But the part of the report that really caught our attention was a few of the stats on Arizona’s housing market. 

• In 2023, Arizona issued about 34,000 single-family building permits. That’s down more than 8% from 2022 (though December last year was slightly busier than November, which could indicate a coming upswing). 

• Multifamily building permits were also down in 2023, though by a smaller 1.3%. 

• And in January, the median home price in Maricopa County rose to $463,000, representing a 5.2% increase over January 2023's median home price (and a 1.7% increase over December's median sale price).

Meghan McCain isn’t burying the hatchet with Kari Lake, who is now courting the McCain machine that she drove a stake through the heart of right before losing the 2022 election. 

Lake made a desperate Twitter appeal to the daughter of the man she mocked after death saying they both lost their fathers to cancer so they should make peace. 

The tweets are good, but she really went for the jugular in an interview yesterday with KTAR, where she called Lake “delusional,” said Lake follows Trump around “like a puppy dog,” and said Lake is dumb, but not dumb enough to trash the McCain wing of the party again. 

“My entire take on this situation is just that the internal polling for the Kari Lake campaign must just be staggeringly awful and scary to them when it comes to independents and McCain Republicans not voting for her,” she said.