Arizona Republicans raised serious allegations Thursday around Democrat Gov. Katie Hobbs’ approval of a $700,000 upgrade of the state logo by Urias Communications, owned by the brother of Office of Tourism Director Lisa Urias. On Friday morning, the Governor’s office announced that Urias would resign. Hobbs told reporters, ”This appearance of conflict is not acceptable.”
Arizona State senator Jake Hoffman laid out his allegations in a lengthy post to X in which he cited a report from Arizona Agenda. The Agenda reported that the Arizona Office of Tourism spent a sum of $700,000 originating from COVID-19 federal relief funds “on 57 in-person and digital listening sessions across the state, not to mention the $27,500 that went to the brother of the CEO of Urias’ marketing agency. He helped work on the logo with a separate graphic design company.”
Hoffman wrote, “’And of all the artists in the state who could have drafted that logo, the contract just happened to go to one who has close ties to the Office of Tourism Director Lisa Urias’—her brother.”
🚨 KATIE HOBBS CORRUPTION EXPOSED
AZ Democrat @KatieHobbs approved illegally shelling out $700,000 for a new state logo
Hobbs' fake director of tourism has been caught funneling MASSIVE contracts to her own brother.@realTomHorne is wrapped up in this scandal too
Hoffman added, “Katie Hobbs continues to exploit her office, break the law, and take advantage of the people of Arizona. This is what it looks like when Democrats are in control of your government.”
Senator John Kavanagh, when briefed by the outlet, reportedly called the matter “clearly an ethical violation. Whether or not it’s a legal violation is another issue.”
According to the report from Arizona Agenda, Urias’ mandate upon taking office included the hefty rebranding of Arizona to include “elements of Arizona’s Native American cultures in the design.” To that end the Office of Tourism engaged the services of Urias Communications, a company that is still owned by the director, although she “doesn’t have any role in its day-to-day operations,” as claimed by the tourism department’s communications director Josh Coddington.
The outlet noted that the Office of Tourism under Urias is leveraging a tax-funded budget of $8 million to woo tourists to come to Arizona, adding, “The appointment seems to have been an economic driver for Urias Communications as well.”
The Agenda concluded, “But even if she isn’t involved with the day-to-day operations of the company that she founded, Urias seems to be financially benefiting from the state’s contract with her company at the same time she is pulling a salary from the state.”
The report added that over a year after Urias became Director of Arizona’s Office of Tourism, her firm went on to win a $250,000 five-year contract from the Arizona Department of Education. This led Hoffman to remark that Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne “is wrapped up in this scandal too.”
However, Horne refuted this in a response posted to X saying “Senator, we paid $15K on an expiring 1-year contract with Urias. ADE does not, nor will it, have a $250K contract with Urias. Get your facts straight.”
Documents are at your office. Unlike the Governor we don't know Urias personally. Next time ask first. pic.twitter.com/eHBw6Yggio
Hoffman replied, “Public reporting says otherwise. Send the receipts to back up what you’re saying to my Senate office. Would be glad to find out the public reporting is wrong. Need the receipts though.” Horne followed up that the documentation had been sent to Hoffman’s office, even posting an image of the documentation. He added, “Documents are at your office. Unlike the Governor we don’t know Urias personally. Next time ask first.”
In a letter to Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes and Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, Majority Whip Sen. Teresa Martinez called for an investigation into the allegations. Within twenty-four hours, Urias’ resignation was announced.
Urias responded to the allegations in a statement Friday saying, “In light of the Senate Confirmation members making it clear they will not confirm me as Tourism Director—despite the recent allegations being untrue and unfounded—I have tendered my resignation to the Governor.”
Amid the passage of historic school choice legislation in Arizona, the educational opportunities available to students and families today are unparalleled with the state’s universal ESA program. In addition to providing Arizona families with voice, choice, and agency in their child’s education, the ESA program has the potential to save Arizona taxpayers considerable funds from future school district bond and override measures.
However, to realize these savings, a long overdue conversation about rightsizing Arizona’s public schools is necessary. Despite significant population growth within Arizona, the enrollment forecasts for most school districts anticipate a period of long-term decline due to lower childbirths, affordability, and alternative options. This demonstrates a pressing need to review the budgets and assets of public school districts and align them with future enrollment projections.
Given the significant competition from the rise in homeschooling, as well as charter and private schools, public schools are no longer the only game in town. As a result, greater scrutiny from local taxpayers is needed in holding school districts fiscally accountable by questioning their need for additional funds through bonds and overrides.
What Are School Bonds & Overrides?
School bonds are loans that school districts sell to investors, who are repaid through the district’s future property taxes. These bond funds have specific limitations on their use and cannot be used to increase staff salaries. In most instances, these funds are leveraged for infrastructure projects involving the construction of new facilities or upgrades to existing ones. In contrast, overrides go directly to school districts and can be used for staff salaries and various programs outlined by the district requesting the override.
This November, a total of 23 school districts in Maricopa County will have bond and/or override measures on the ballot. Among these 23 districts, at least 4—Kyrene Elementary School District, Mesa Unified School District, Gilbert Unified School District, Scottsdale Unified School District—are in dire need of rightsizing before requesting additional funds from taxpayers based on their pronounced decline in enrollment.
In particular, Mesa USD, the state’s largest school district, enrolls fewer students today than it did in the fall of 1990. Yet, the district’s real estate portfolio somehow contains 78 schools, in addition to various non-instructional facilities and offices throughout the city. Mesa USD, as well as surrounding districts in similar positions, need to do right by taxpayers in exploring the sale of underutilized real estate before passing the buck to taxpayers.
As seen in the table below, only Gilbert USD has shown an increase in enrollment since the fall of 2000, and none of the districts can report an increase in enrollment in the last 10 years. Given the growth in ESA adoption and charter school enrollment, the pragmatic move is to respond to these declines now by rightsizing these districts, pursuing the sale of district assets, and removing administrative bloat.
Among the clearest signs of waste and inefficiency can be found in the amount of unspent federal pandemic relief funds provided to schools around the country. In the case of the 4 school districts requesting additional funds from taxpayers, they collectively still have access to tens of millions in unspent, flexible funds that are set to expire in a year.
What this experiment in “helicopter money” confirms is that the problem ailing local school districts is not a lack of funds, but rather their inability to direct funds efficiently. In the absence of a public monopoly, this decline in public school enrollment will continue to eat into taxpayers’ wallets with the additional forces of demographic shifts, affordability, and competition from the growing number of viable and efficient alternatives in the form of charter schools, private schools, microschools, and homeschool co-ops.
In adjusting to this historic era of school choice, the need for fiscal accountability remains essential on behalf of public school districts that have been reluctant to change and control their costs. To avoid perpetually funding buildings and bureaucracy, local taxpayers and residents must ensure their voices are heard.
Arman Sidhu is a lifelong Arizona resident and previously worked in K-12 education as a principal and teacher. He currently leads a nonprofit microschool.
In November 2023, there will be 23 districts within Maricopa County that are asking voters to approve a new Bond Issue, Budget Override, or District Additional Assistance.
One of the constant themes from the Educational Industrial Complex is that schools are underfunded and teachers are woefully underpaid. However, in the Arizona state 2024 budget, 50% of the total budget is allocated to education which includes K-12 schools, community colleges, and universities.
According to the Arizona Joint Legislative Budget Committee, per student funding at the state, local, and federal levels in fiscal year 2024 is an estimated $14,673 per student. This is up from 2023 funding at $14,025 per student. Contrast that with 2015 which was $9,124 per student.
To put the spending issue into perspective, Mesa Unified, the state’s largest district, is asking for an approval for $500 million in new bonds as well as a 15% budget override. However, the district has $182 million in unspent funds from the 2018 Bond initiative as well as $173 million in unspent COVID relief funds. Couple this with the $863 million the district will receive from the state in fiscal year 2024 and that’s roughly $1.2 billion dollars. Why is the district asking for more?
Despite this funding, the academic achievement for Mesa schools districtwide is abysmal. In 2022, only 38% of students were proficient or highly proficient at English Language arts, and only 31% of students are proficient or highly proficient at math. In addition, the 2022 graduation rate was 76%.
Some might argue that the recent steep inflation devalues the increased education spending by the legislature. But this is a two-way street. After all, taxpayers are also subject to inflation and asking them to keep increasing funding for an obviously broken system is not sustainable.
Finally, history shows that Mesa taxpayers are not anti-education. In 2018, they passed a $300 million dollar bond to increase funding. Fast forward to 2023 and the financial picture for Mesa schools is much healthier. Why are they asking for more money despite the fact that academic scores have remained flat for the last four years? The answer is not additional funding.
Enough is enough. The people of Arizona should reject all bond and override initiatives.
Nancy Cottle is a longtime East Mesa community resident. You can follow her on X here.
Suddenly America is facing a severe structural labor shortage. We all feel it, whether we’re trying for reservations at a restaurant that has reduced hours, seeking handyman help, or just trying to get somebody to answer the dang phone.
Nurses and teachers are in short supply. Employers report at least two job openings for each job seeker. Beyond personal inconvenience, when workers produce fewer services and goods for dollars to chase, prices go up and inflation results.
You can partly blame it on COVID. Politicians shut down much of the economy, then shoved trillions of dollars in “COVID relief funds” to those forced not to work.
Unfortunately, the spigot was never fully closed, and many Americans found that sleeping in agreed with them. Europe, Canada, and Japan all rebounded while the U.S. was left with about one million fewer workers.
Adding to the problem, the youth anti-work movement continues to grow. Work is for suckers and victims. Social media outlets praise workers for quitting their jobs. Others are lionized for being “quiet quitters,” idlers who do the least work possible while still collecting a paycheck.
The inspiration for the anti-work cult traces back to the Marxist anti-capitalist movement, a long-time foe of the American work tradition. Their thesis is that capitalist employment is exploitive and therefore, not working is virtuous.
It coincidentally turns out that, for many Americans, government policy has significantly disincentivized work. And for these people, working harder is no longer the way to get ahead.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Phil Gramm and John Early explain how this effect is commonly underestimated because of the way income is reported by the federal government. The Census Bureau, inexplicably, does not treat most transfer payments as income.
That’s important because government transfer payments to the bottom 20% of households, income-wise, ballooned by 269% between 1967 and 2017 while the middle 20% realized only a 154% increase in their after tax income.
The results were staggering. In 2017, the bottom 20% of households had $6,941 in “income” and only 36% of working age people actually worked. However, after the transfer payments and taxes are included, as they should be, their total income was $48,806.
The second to the bottom quintile had 85% employment and an average total income of $50,492, actually less than a $2,000 difference from the lowest group. The middle quintile was 92% employed and earned $66,453, but after taxes and transfers that shrank to $61,350, merely 26% more than the bottom quintile.
But wait, there’s more. Family units are smaller in the lowest quintile than the others. Per capita, the adjusted net income was actually $33,653 in the lowest quintile, $29,497 in the next lowest, and $32,754 in the middle.
Sorry for all the numbers, but they tell an important story. For 60% of Americans, working much harder and even earning more money produced a negligible net benefit. Means-tested government programs were just as lucrative. It’s not hard to understand why the percentage of working age people in the lowest quintile who were employed fell from 68% in 1967 to 36% in 2017.
Policymakers seem to believe that incentives don’t matter, but they do. People who choose not to work and live off the labor of others earn some understandable resentment, but they’re not acting irrationally under the circumstance. The heart of the problem is their enablers in Big Government who, for their own political purposes, created this perverse system.
It’s often forgotten that in the 1990s, governments established work requirements for many means-tested benefits. “Workfare” was a generational policy success. In spite of hysterical warnings that “children would starve in the streets,” poverty rates dropped as employment increased.
Unfortunately, the advocates for workfare declared victory and moved on. But welfare bureaucrats stayed put, patiently reestablishing their vision of welfare without requirements. So now poverty is supported rather than reduced. And Arizona was among the states that quietly removed the work requirements for Medicaid and other welfare programs.
But government handouts that replace labor don’t work. They erode self-reliance, worker pride, and self-sufficiency. They threaten our shared prosperity. And most of all, they undermine American values.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
The Phoenix City Council gave $5 million of the city’s COVID-19 recovery funds to the Maricopa County Community College District (MCCCD) Foundation.
The millions will be distributed to around 400 students with financial need through a newly-launched tuition assistance program, the Phoenix Promise Program. However, the program won’t end once the $5 million of American Rescue Plan Action (ARPA) funding is spent. The city stated last month that they would partner with the MCCD Foundation, along with other, unnamed education institutions, the business community, nonprofits, local governments, and philanthropic organizations to perpetuate the program.
One of the nonprofits that assisted the city of Phoenix and MCCCD in developing the Phoenix Promise Program was Aliento, an illegal immigrant activist organization. The Arizona House awarded a proclamation to the organization for its service to “mixed-document” backgrounds in June.
Phoenix Promise Program will benefit historically marginalized students, low-income, BIPOC, single parents, and returning students who are residents of Phoenix. pic.twitter.com/G9NoFfVaXQ
The city first approved this initial $5 million allocation in early June, followed by a contract with MCCD Foundation at the end of August. The first tuition assistance payments will be awarded for the upcoming Spring 2023 semester, and will be awarded each semester through Spring 2025. About $280,000 of the $5 million will go to administrative costs.
🎓NOW: Council unanimously approves a $5M Phoenix Promise Program that my office developed in partnership with @AlientoAZ, @MCCCDF & @PhxDistrict4.
Now, we work to provide 400 students with tuition assistance & wraparound support to any @mcccd. https://t.co/GOX0KUKhj6
— Councilwoman Yassamin Ansari (@District7PHX) August 31, 2022
Each Phoenix Promise Program recipient will receive $965 each semester. In addition to tuition, recipients may use their funds to pay for books, fees, technology, supplies, transportation, food, and childcare.
The program will also provide recipients with an academic advisor; exclusive access to workshops, boot camps, tutoring, counseling, and other support services; and personalized assistance from MCCCD’s career services.
During Wednesday’s city council meeting, Councilwoman Yassamin Ansari lamented that illegal immigrant students with deferred deportation — namely Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients, also known as DREAMers — don’t qualify for the funding. Ansari disclosed that city and county officials are researching how to secure funding for them.
“Because this is federal funding, we are unable legally to support our DACA students with it but something we’re looking to do very soon, now that we’ve launched the program, is bringing in other partners,” said Ansari.
The application deadline for Phoenix Promise Program’s Spring 2023 awards is October 31.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
