Earlier this year, Gov. Katie Hobbs’ staff warned Democrats not to make summer vacation plans. Budget negotiations had already gone off the rails, and there was no sign of agreement any time soon.
In March, Republicans accused Hobbs of throwing a tantrum after she walked away from negotiations. They passed their own veto-bait budget, then bitterly left the Capitol for a month with no progress on budget negotiations.
The tone changed last week, when Hobbs and Senate President Warren Petersen suddenly sounded weirdly agreeable in radio interviews, and both suggested they’re close to a deal to prevent the state government from shutting down.
So when lawmakers returned from their self-imposed spring break Monday, there were high hopes that budget bills would be waiting for them.
Instead, they handled leftover bills on squatters, vapes, divorces and other non-budget business, and recessed indefinitely.
The general Capitol chatter is that budget bills will drop next week, roughly three weeks before the June 30 constitutional deadline to pass a state budget.
And while there are finally signs of an actual deal, lawmakers are not exactly inspiring confidence.
They still have leftover legislation to clear, a pile of potential ballot referrals to sort through, and for some Republicans, an upcoming trip to Washington, D.C., on the calendar.
Republican Sen. John Kavanagh, one of the few lawmakers actually negotiating the budget, said there definitely won’t be any budget bills this week. Negotiators are still figuring out the final sticking points, or “footnotes.”
Then, the bill-writers at the Legislative Council have to turn whatever deal comes out of negotiations into a stack of massive budget bills, lawmakers have to discuss them in committee hearings, and the bills have to be read on three separate days.
Lawmakers can waive the committee hearings and the three-day read requirements with a two-thirds vote in each chamber.
But they can’t waive travel schedules.
About a dozen Republican senators are taking a three-day trip to D.C. for a “White House State Leadership Conference,” where they’ll hear “about President Trump’s America First Agenda and ways states can partner with the administration on shared policy priorities,” Senate Republican spokesperson Kim Quintero said.
Quintero said the conference itself is a single-afternoon event on June 16, but the trip is still planned over three days. Not to worry, “lawmakers remain committed to completing their work and passing a balanced budget before the June 30 constitutional deadline, as they’ve done every year,” she said.
The conference isn’t unique to Arizona lawmakers. The Trump administration has held similar events for legislators from other states throughout the year, organized through the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs.
When news of the trip broke in April, Republicans caught flak for planning to leave town during budget season. But Quintero said about eight Democratic senators are also planning a D.C. field trip “to meet with Democrat counterparts during the same timeframe.”
We asked Senate Democratic leader Priya Sundareshan whether Democrats are planning a D.C. visit.
“No. We've told our members not to book travel given the budget negotiations are still ongoing,” she said.
Whether or not Democrats join the mid-budget travel, Republicans largely control when the budget goes up for a vote, and if it has the votes to pass. And the D.C. trip comes at a pretty inconvenient time, leaving little room for last-minute holdouts and general legislative tomfoolery.
Most lawmakers aren’t too worried about it.
“I mean, ideally we get it all wrapped up next week. If not and negotiations break down, negotiations continue whether in person or not,” Republican Sen. TJ Shope said. “We ran a whole state and country that way for well over a year, right? Some states even longer.”
But the budget isn’t the only end-of-session mess waiting for lawmakers when they get back.
About 20 ballot referrals are still up in the air, and Republicans have to whittle down which measures they actually want to send to voters.
We’re tracking all the referrals that could still make your November ballot on Skywolf, our legislation tracking service.
Those referrals are one of the most powerful tools GOP lawmakers have in a divided government — they represent a way to pass partisan policies while avoiding Hobbs’ veto stamp. Republicans already sent three measures to the November ballot last year, and now they have to decide which of this year’s pending referrals make the cut.
But the deadlines for informing voters about potential General Election ballot measures further complicate this year’s crunched timeline.
When lawmakers pass a referral, the Secretary of State’s office has to include it in the publicity pamphlet it mails to voters. For $75, anyone can submit an argument for or against a ballot measure to appear in that pamphlet, and those arguments are due June 24.
The ballot argument submission page currently lists the potential legislative referrals that lawmakers could still pass this year, and it gives the option to submit arguments in case those measures make it to the ballot.
In other words: You can pay $75 to publish your hypothetical ballot take, for or against any one of the measures, then hope lawmakers actually send (or fail to send) the measure to voters.
Fun fact: Because there are literally no rules about what you can say in those arguments, we spent a few hundred bucks in 2024 to write arguments for and against ballot measures that were really just advertisements for the Agenda. It worked pretty well!
Kavanagh said lawmakers usually don’t decide which referrals they’ll send to voters until after they pass a state budget.
He doesn’t know why, exactly, beyond “tradition, I guess,” but speculated that lawmakers save the fight for the end because it can get messy.
“Maybe because it’s an extremely difficult decision that elates some people and upsets some people if theirs doesn’t get up,” Kavanagh said. “So maybe they just want to avoid having it disrupt the budget. But it’s almost always done at the very end.”
This year’s remaining referrals include hugely consequential state policy changes, like prohibiting local governments from raising taxes without voter approval and allowing people sentenced to death to choose execution by firing squad.
There’s also a long list of measures asking voters to ban things, including boys in girls’ sports, DEI in state government and traffic cameras.
We asked Quintero whether Senate Republicans plan to pass all the referrals they want this year before the June 24 ballot argument deadline.
“That’s the goal,” she said.
But there's one thing giving us some faith that our politicians may wrap this budget vote up quickly: Early ballots for the primary election get mailed out on June 24.
A rogues gallery: All those lawsuits filed by Democratic Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes ginned up an array of political adversaries who are now bankrolling ads for Republican Senate President Warren Petersen as he tries to unseat Mayes in November, the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy reports. The lineup of donors to Restore Order Arizona — the PAC behind the ads — includes private prison operator GEO Group, mobile home operator BoaVida Group, vaping companies, and other businesses that feel they’d get a better deal if Mayes were out of office.
Touching a nerve: Republican lawmakers want to shorten how long a divorced person has to pay their former spouse, per Capitol scribe Howie Fischer. SB1049 would set a maximum of four years of paying spousal support, even if a judge believes it should be longer. But the backstory of the bill is where it really gets interesting: Republican Sen. Wendy Rogers said she sponsored the bill to help out Petersen, and Craig Harris at 12News noted that Petersen divorced his wife in 2021 and paid her more than $200,000 and gave her a house. Petersen took to Twitter to clarify in no uncertain terms that his ex-wife remarried in 2022 and he hasn’t owed her any money since then. But we’ve been around long enough to remember that Petersen also sponsored a bill in 2022 that overhauled Arizona's alimony laws. That bill required the state Supreme Court to create guidelines for spousal maintenance and said it should only last long enough to get the receiving spouse back on their feet, not indefinitely.
Downtown Phoenix land, at a bargain: The Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank, is suing the City of Phoenix to stop it from selling a primo piece of land valued at $4.8 million to a developer for a steeply discounted $1.5 million, the New Times’ Clarissa Sosin reports. The developer, Pennrose, has claimed it is going to make all 60 units affordable housing and start an early childhood education center run by the (Jeff) Bezos Academy — but the academy told the New Times it has no plans to do that, further bringing into question the city’s valuation methods for the land transfer.
“What strikes us as so abusive is they are counting their own corporate revenues as the public benefit,” Goldwater Senior Attorney Tony Napolitano told us in an interview. “If you think about that, any business would be able to claim that its corporate revenue is a public benefit.”
Purcell cites Purcell: Former longtime Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell weighed in on the election dispute in Maricopa County, saying whatever the correct division of responsibilities might be between the Board of Supervisors and Recorder Justin Heap, it’d be unwise to make any changes until after the primary election, if at all, Ronald J. Hansen reports for the Republic. Her reasoning should come as no surprise to longtime political observers: The “Purcell principle” that courts shouldn’t change electoral rules too close to an election is named after her.
The Agenda Principle is simple: The more paid subscribers we get, the more reporters we can hire.
Seeing an opening: While Mark Lamb deals with (or tries to avoid entirely) allegations that he sexted women and intimidated them to stay quiet — a story that now includes a woman who can corroborate seeing those sexts, which she said made her want to “puke” — Lamb’s opponent in the Congressional District 5 GOP primary, Daniel Keenan, is trying to capitalize on the moment. So far, the main differences between the two candidates are that Keenan can still say he’s scandal-free and he believes Trump won the 2020 election, while Lamb said in his 2022 Senate run that Trump lost, per KTAR’s Jim Sharpe.
That’ll be a tough sell: Experts say the Colorado River will continue its “slide toward crash” if the Southwest gets another dry winter like this past year, Brandon Loomis reports for the Republic. Even another wet winter, like 2023, would only push that scenario back a year or two.
Our favorite solo act recording artist, former lawmaker / secretary of state / Cyber Ninja liaison, Ken Bennett, visited the Senate this week to give retiring Democratic Sen. Lela Alston a proper send-off. You're welcome.