Rep. Shawnna Bolick says a tweet she wrote Wednesday was not intended as a commentary on the Senate’s ongoing audit of Maricopa County’s election process. Instead, she was simply trying to draw attention to a double-standard by many state Democrats on the issue of public-private partnerships.
Bolick (R-LD20) is a strong supporter of Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA) which thousands of Arizona families can utilize to provide school choice for students. As Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, she has championed SB1452 which seeks to expand ESA eligibility to thousands more students.
But Bolick says she has seen many Democrats who do not support giving families more choice in a child’s education if that choice involves a privately run school. Then on Wednesday morning, Bolick was reading comments about the Senate’s election audit when an article caught her attention.
That article reported on how Maricopa County does not have the administrative passwords necessary to access key voting equipment the auditors want to review. Those passwords appear to be in the control of Dominion Voting Systems, a private company which leases voting equipment to the county.
And that, Bolick says, prompted a bit of a snarky retort “comparing how the Left is okay with our democratic process being turned over to a private entity for elections, but they are not okay with kids going to, say, a private school.”
“I see so much hypocrisy in the world, so it’s fun sometimes to point out an issue that might not even be related to another issue,” Bolick said, adding she did not mean to suggest private companies should never be involved in elections. “Just a little poke on hypocrisy between different governance structures and ideas. Nothing more, nothing less.”
An amended version of SB1452 which came through Bolick’s committee is slated to be considered by the House on Thursday. If it passes the legislation will have to return to the Senate for a final vote.
Bolick also serves as Vice-Chair of the House Criminal Justice Reform Committee.
Two topics that arise year after year, teacher’s salaries and public-school budgets, are often misunderstood and misrepresented. In fact, many say the RedForEd movement was created and nurtured with those misunderstandings and misrepresentations.
The misunderstanding and misrepresentation has led to frustration for taxpayers and parents. Many of whom feel that no matter how much they pay in taxes, nothing seems to get better in kids’ classrooms.
A new study by the Goldwater Institute indicates those feelings and frustrations might be justified.
According to Goldwater, the “20×2020” plan, approved by Arizona lawmakers in 2018, was designed to provide enough funding to give Arizona teachers a 20% raise. However, Goldwater has discovered that schools are not allocating the funds the way lawmakers intended them to be.
In The Truth about Teacher Pay in Arizona: How Arizona School Districts Have Held Back Teacher Salaries, Blamed Lawmakers, and Continually Captured Public Sympathy, Matt Beienburg, Director of Education Policy at the Goldwater Institute found that “school districts used the majority of the new 20×2020 funds simply to replace, rather than add to, existing buckets of state money for teachers (and vice versa). The result: During the 2019-2020 school year alone, teachers received at least $170 million less from their school districts in salary increases than Arizona taxpayers provided for. And it’s part of a decades-long pattern in Arizona education.”
So what are schools doing with the extra funding that is being provided?
“District spending on administration, for instance, has risen by nearly $2,000 in inflation-adjusted terms per class of 20 students, even as teacher salaries were no higher through fiscal year 2020,” according to Beienburg.
Each year, teachers use their own money to buy supplies and decorations for their classrooms and to help offset the consistently growing list of “must buy” supplies sent to parents at the start of the school year. Yet, during the 1983-1984 school year almost 2,000 managers, supervisors, and directors were inexplicably added to Arizona school districts’ payrolls.
Many teachers have expressed frustration about not being a priority and tend to put pressure and blame on lawmakers as part of their demands for more money. It seems, though, that it is the school district administrators who need to feel the pressure and are to blame.
This last year has also placed additional stress on teachers and parents, with virtual and hybrid learning due to COVID-19.
Members of the state legislature requested that the COVID-19 stimulus revenue funds were given for school district use but the Arizona Department of Education (ADE) has declined to distribute much of the millions of dollars.
While it may be easy to blame political leaders and taxpayers for lack of support and failing to prioritize teachers, it seems to many observers that the attention should be on the ADE, school district administrators, and school boards who need to review and reconsider their budgets and priorities.
Arizona’s Permanent Early Voter List (PEVL) is no longer permanent, after Gov. Doug Ducey signed one of Arizona’s most important pieces of election integrity legislation in years on Tuesday.
The Arizona Senate approved SB1485 earlier in the day to ensure Arizona voters receive a mail-in ballot only if they signed-up to and now wish to continue automatically receiving a ballot before each election. It provides for a voter’s removal from the newly named Early Voting List (EVL) if a voter did not cast a ballot in at least one of four consecutive elections and did not respond to messages from their county recorder to remain on the list.
“This bill is a modest, but critical step toward restoring confidence in our election system,” sponsor Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita stated in a press release.
Proponents of SB1485 touted its cost-savings impact for counties from only printing and paying postage for early ballots a voter expects to use. But the main impact, they said, would be ensuring that tens of thousands of early ballots are not mailed out to voters who no longer utilize the option.
Opponents of the bill deflected from the election integrity benefit and tried to characterize the bill as targeting minority populations to make it harder to vote.
However, being dropped from what is now EVL has no impact on a voter’s right to vote and all voters remain registered to vote. That was a message the governor focused on in his comments while signing SB1485 a short time after its passage in the Senate on a 16 to 14 vote.
“Let’s be clear — despite all the deceptive and heated rhetoric being used by some partisan activists to lobby against this reform, not a single Arizona voter will lose their right to vote as a result of this new law,” Ducey stated in a video his office released to announce that SB1485 had been signed.
Ugenti-Rita’s bill was amended several weeks ago to win the support of more Republican lawmakers in the House. The amendment softened the bill, according to experts, so that a voter would have to miss all elections within a two-year period -including any city or other minor elections- to be dropped from the EVL.
Ducey used the bill’s signing to push back on national companies inserting themselves into Arizona’s election laws.
“These big businesses have seemed to embrace a static view of elections,” he said. “Freeze the systems the way they are and view any change suspiciously. It’s wrong. Dead wrong.”
On Tuesday, the Arizona Legislature called on the U.S. Congress to fund a feasibility study for the development of a dam and pipeline to harvest floodwater from the Mississippi River to replenish the Colorado River.
The request took the form of House Concurrent Memorial (HCM) 2004, sponsored by Rep. Tim Dunn. The proposal outlined in the Memorial authorizes the official legislative communication – commonly referred to as a “postcard to Congress,” was passed on Tuesday with a vote of the Arizona Senate.
Dunn’s bill outlines that if it’s shown to be feasible, the U.S. Congress is urged to implement the diversion dam and pipeline as a partial solution to the water supply shortage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead and the flood damage that occurs along the Mississippi River.
HCM 2004 directs the Arizona Secretary of State to transmit copies of the Memorial to the President of the U.S. Senate, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Governors of the Mississippi River states of Arkansas, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee and Wisconsin, and to each member of Congress from the State of Arizona.
In Arizona, water from the Colorado River enters the Central Arizona Project canal to reach the cities of Phoenix and Tucson. Under the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan, Arizona is already taking cuts to its CAP supply.
The state’s junior rights mean its Colorado River supply is more vulnerable than other states.
The question as to how much water can the Colorado River reliably produce into the future is at the core of all of plans.
“Arizona has long been at the forefront among western states in supporting the development and implementation of pioneering, well-reasoned water management policies,” Dunn said in a press release. “Arizona and the other six Colorado Basin states are in the twentieth year of severe drought and experiencing a severe water shortage. Water levels are critical levels, jeopardizing the water delivery and power generation. A new water source could help augment Colorado River supplies. One promising possibility involves piping water that is harvested from Mississippi River flood waters. Diverting this water, which is otherwise lost into the Gulf of Mexico, would also help prevent the loss of human life and billions in economic damages when such flooding occurs. This concept is already being proven in Denver, where floodwater is being successfully harvested from the Missouri River to help alleviate its water shortage.”
As the border crisis rages, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey and 19 fellow governors are calling on President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to take action to end the humanitarian debacle.
Just this week, Chief Patrol Agent Chris T. Clem tweeted: #YumaSector agents encountered a nine-year-old girl and a 12- and 17-year-old boy on the west side of Yuma Sunday morning after they illegally crossed the border into the U.S. by themselves. In the last week, agents have apprehended 24 unaccompanied children under the age of 13.
#YumaSector agents encountered a nine-year-old girl and a 12- and 17-year-old boy on the west side of Yuma Sunday morning after they illegally crossed the border into the U.S. by themselves. In the last week, agents have apprehended 24 unaccompanied children under the age of 13. pic.twitter.com/fqw35CV5GL
— Chief Patrol Agent Chris T. Clem (@USBPChiefYUM) May 10, 2021
The governors are asking the Biden administration to end what they say are “destructive policies that have created the crisis at the southern border.”
They remind the administration that their letter “follows months of deteriorating conditions at the border in Arizona and other states.”
According to the governors, in March, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 172,000 encounters, the highest number in nearly 20 years, as well as 18,890 unaccompanied children, the largest monthly number in history.
Also on Tuesday, the Arizona Attorney General tweeted: April stats from DHS show another record-number of encounters w/ migrants– more than 178,000 last month, including 17,000+ minors (not including “got-aways”). The longer the President maintains his reckless immigration policies, the worse this crisis at our border will get.
“As a border state, Arizona is on the front lines of the border crisis. We feel the impacts of human trafficking, drug smuggling, and this humanitarian crisis first,” said Ducey. “Now, the Biden-Harris border crisis is affecting other states too. And it’s clear the crisis is the direct result of this administration’s broken policies and botched messaging.”
“Arizona has deployed all available resources, including the National Guard, but we need federal cooperation to secure the border,” Governor Ducey said. “Today, I am joining 19 fellow governors to call for immediate action from President Biden and Vice President Harris to stop this crisis before it gets even worse.”
Arizona has been calling for action on the border crisis from the federal government for months. Last month, Governor Ducey declared a state of emergency at the southern border and deployed the Arizona National Guard to support law enforcement agencies in border regions. The Governor visited a wide-open section of the border in Yuma and called on President Biden to issue a national state of emergency on the border. Governor Ducey and Texas Governor Greg Abbott also wrote a joint op-ed in the Washington Post.
Signers of the letter include Governors Bill Lee, of Tennessee, Kay Ivey, of Alabama, Asa Hutchinson, of Arkansas, Brian Kemp, of Georgia, Brad Little, of Idaho, Eric Holcomb, of Indiana, Kim Reynolds, of Iowa, Tate Reeves, of Mississippi, Governor Mike Parson, of Missouri, Governor Greg Gianforte, of Montana, Governor Pete Ricketts, of Nebraska, Governor Chris Sununu, of New Hampshire, Governor Doug Burgum, of North Dakota, Governor Kevin Stitt, of Oklahoma, Governor Henry McMaster, of South Carolina, Governor Kristi Noem, of South Dakota, Governor Greg Abbott, of Texas, Governor Spencer Cox, of Utah, and Governor Mark Gordon, of Wyoming.
What promised to be Republicans’ most impactful state election integrity bill of the legislative session did not get voted on Monday, despite being on the calendar for a final reading in the State Senate.
Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita’s SB1485 has the potential to drop more than 207,000 inactive voter names from the Permanent Early Voter List (PEVL). Removal would not happen if a voter responds to a written notice about the impending change, which in no way alters or impacts a voter’s registration status.
Arizona’s 15 county recorders would collectively save tens of thousands of dollars each election through reduced printing and postage costs. But the biggest selling point for SB1485 is its election integrity benefit of ensuring 207,000 early ballots are not put into the U.S. mail system if voters do not intend to use them.
Getting Ugenti-Rita’s bill to Gov. Doug Ducey had been considered a sure thing due to Senate Republicans holding a 16 to 14 majority. That certainty ended last month when Sen. Kelly Townsend announced she will not vote for any election-related legislation until the Senate’s audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 General Election is complete.
Townsend has expressed displeasure with Ugenti-Rita’s lack of support for getting many of Townsend’s 18 election bills out of committee this session. As a result, Ugenti-Rita was forced into the embarrassing position of voting against her own bill to preserve any chance of revoting on SB1485 during a future Senate floor session.
That revote was set for Monday, but Senate President Karen Fann held the bill without further comment. The Senate is tentatively scheduled for daily floor sessions through Thursday but as of press time the PEVL legislation has not been added to any of those calendars.
