Sen. Linda Gray

   Arizona journalists frequently criticize state lawmakers for failing to respect the public’s right to know by passing laws that undermine the state open records law and enable government agencies to hide information.
   So it’s only fair that the Legislature receive some praise today for forcing more agencies to provide more access to critically relevant election information – campaign finance reports.
   On Tuesday, Gov. Janet Napolitano signed into law Senate Bill 1024, which requires the secretary of state, counties with more than 100,000 people and most cities and towns to post campaign finance reports on that government’s official Web site. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Linda Gray, R-Phoenix, shouldn’t impose any burdens on Secretary of State Jan Brewer or Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell, as their agencies already make campaign reports available on the Internet. The secretary of state’s site has improved dramatically in the past two years after undergoing some major upgrades to make it more compatible with reporting requirements for the Citizens Clean Elections Commission.
   Maricopa County just posts .pdf versions of the original finance reports on paper. This forces everyone to hunt through each candidate’s reports and makes it impossible to search for information by donors or expenses. But still, it’s better than having to drive to downtown Phoenix every time you want to research a candidate or a particular race.
   Now, Pinal County and East Valley cities will have to start posting the same information online once the law goes into effect later this year. Hopefully, they will adopt a system more like the secretary of state’s, which requires candidates to file electronically instead of on paper. That approach is far more useful to just about anyone interested in how much money candidates are raising and who is contributing to them.

Susan Bitter Smith 

Susan Bitter Smith of Scottsdale finally jumped last week into the crowded Republican primary field to challenge Rep. Harry Mitchell, D-Ariz. And I think there’s one reason why: Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Bitter Smith had been publicly toying for months with the idea of joining a race that already has state Rep. Mark Anderson, R-Mesa, former state Rep. Laura Knaperek, lobbyist James Ogsbury and former County Treasurer Kevin Schweikert. Normally, I would write off even an experienced politician like Bitter Smith after getting a pretty late start.
But not now. I have no idea how Bitter Smith did it, but she wrapped up Arpaio’s personal endorsement and had him on hand for the formal announcement at her home Thursday.
Voters usually aren’t swayed much by candidate endorsements. But they often make a difference to political donors and grass root party activists who have to decide which candidate to support and how hard they are going to work.
Arpaio can’t claim a golden touch (just ask Mitt Romney). But his name will help Bitter Smith stand out for the next couple of months. And Arpaio can aid Bitter Smith to counter claims that she’s too moderate or liberal for Republicans in Congressional District 5.
Bitter Smith is a former Scottsdale City Councilwoman who currently serves in an elected position on the board of directors for the Central Arizona Project and on the Balsz Elementary School District board. She came in a close third in the same primary race from 2000 that sent Jeff Flake to Congress from the old District 1.
Full disclosure: Through a prior role as executive director of the state’s cable television association, Bitter Smith used to serve on the board of the Arizona First Amendment Coalition, and I’m a board member as well. But I haven’t seen her for a while so I didn’t recognize her at first in her new campaign publicity photo.

ADEQ director Steve Owens (as found at www.adeq.gov)

   The Arizona Legislature has sent Gov. Janet Napolitano some more veto bait, although this is a rare case where I’m glad lawmakers did so. The House voted 36-22 today on the final version of HB2017, which says the state Department of Environmental Quality can’t try to regulate greenhouse gas emissions until granted specific permission by the Legislature. The bill previously passed the state Senate.
   Since ADEQ regulation of greenhouse gases is a centerpiece of Napolitano’s climate change initiative, Republican lawmakers are obviously making a point rather than expecting this bill to become law. And they are right, as Napolitano and ADEQ director Steve Owens are overstretching the agency’s air quality mandate to include carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that traditionally were not defined as pollution.
   Fortunately, the biggest issue to come out of Napolitano’s campaign so far, regulating motor vehicle emissions, can’t go into effect unless or until the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is forced to allow states to step into this arena.
   But passage of HB2017, even with a Napolitano veto, will give at least a little weight to any lawsuits filed against ADEQ to stop further action before the Legislature actually establishes state policy on greenhouse gases.

Gov. Janet Napolitano (second from right) along with ADOT director Victor Mendez help to open a stretch of the Santan Freeway in 2005. (Found at azgovernor.gov)

Tribune writer Dennis Welch has a hot story about Gov. Janet Napolitano cutting a secret deal with Arizona’s biggest homebuilder group to provide $100,000 for an initiative campaign to raise the state sales tax for transportation projects.

The coalition behind the initiative, Transportation and Infrastructure Moving AZ’s Economy, previously had claimed that making growth pay for itself would be essential to any successful statewide transportation plan. Now we know why no such funding mechanism was included in the actual proposal when the campaign to collect initiative signatures was launched Tuesday.

Napolitano was willingly to protect homebuilders, who will benefit heavily from additional transportation construction, in exchange for their cash to get this campaign underway even as the state struggles with a multi-billion budget shortfall.

Sen. John McCain (left), President Bush and Cindy McCain (as found at talkradionews.com)

Tribune writer Paul Giblin is reporting that President Bush will be in Phoenix May 27 at a high-roller fund raiser to bring in money for John McCain’s presidential bid and several related groups including the Republican National Committee and state GOP parties in Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico and Wisconsin.

But not the Arizona Republican Party.

That’s odd because McCain’s home state party apparently could use some help. The Arizona GOP raised only $214,599 through Jan. 31 (the last report available) for state causes and had only $2,594 in cash on hand. Federal reports show the state party had raised $934,051 to support federal candidates as of March 31, and had $129,552 in cash left.

By comparison, the state Democratic Party had raised $934,906 though Jan. 31 for state causes (although it was $289,302 in debt because of additional spending). On the federal side, the Democratic Party had raised a whopping $2.2 million (and spent nearly all of it).

Arizona Republican Party spokesman Tony Reinhard said the local hosts don’t need Bush’s help because McCain will handily defeat the Democrat nominee in November.

“Arizona isn’t in play,” Reinhard said. “We understood that Arizona would be a donor state to help those other states where the race will be more competitive.”

Reinhard said Arizona being snubbed has nothing to do with the fact that McCain and state Republican Party chairman Randy Pullen really, really, really don’t like each other. Pullen has had some rough criticism for Bush and other Republican leaders in the past for being too soft on immigration enforcement.

Pullen’s stance has played well with many grassroots Republicans but has turned off power players who round up the heavy donors. The state party is hoping to overcome that problem Friday night with a major fund-raising dinner and a successful state convention on Saturday, both in Mesa.

ASU President Michael Crow

Arizona State University President Michael Crow definitely knows how to give a politically correct, if not necessarily accurate, answer.

On April 17, Crow and a couple of allies from the construction industries met with the Tribune Editorial Board to promote a $1.4 billion debt package to add new buildings at the state’s three public universities and to remodel older ones.

I pressed Crow on why the universities are asking for so much when the state faces multi-billion dollar deficits. I also asked why haven’t the universities concentrated on the most pressing needs: building safety and maintenance projects that make up about one-third of the request.

Crow gave several reasons why the state should borrow all of the money now, but he also said he’d be happy to accept any amount of money that lawmakers believe the state could afford to spend at this point. If Crow and his colleagues were sincere about that, they would be lobbying just as hard for other bills in the Legislature this year that are creative ways for the universities to fund additional construction.

House Bill 2264, sponsored by Rep. Warde Nichols, R-Gilbert, would have created a permanent exception to the state sales tax on activities that take place on university campuses including merchandise sales and construction payments. Those tax savings would have to be used for building repairs and upgrades. Staff at the Joint Legislative Budget Committee estimated the universities could raise $22 million a year that way, enough to finance most of the building maintenance projects in the $1.4 billion package without taking another dime from the state.

HB2264 never went anywhere in the House, a clear sign the universities ignored it.

Another measure, House Bill 2459 by Rep. Bob Robson, R-Chandler, would transfer control of state trust lands designated for the university system to the Arizona Board of Regents. Right now, all state trust lands are managed by a single agency on behalf of several different groups include grade school districts, the state veterans home, and the Arizona School for the Deaf and Blind.

It’s not clear how much more money the board of regents could wring out of the small portion of state trust lands that belong to the universities. But the regents would have the opportunity to manage the use or sale of those lands for the direct benefit of higher education, instead of relying on an outside agency which has clients with much bigger slices of the pie to worry about.

HB2459 actually has passed the House but has completely stalled in the Senate.

My guess is the universities are so focused on the $1.4 billion package because their most powerful ally, Gov. Janet Napolitano, really wants the most expensive project in the plan – a new campus for the embryonic university medical school in downtown Phoenix with a price tag of $470 million.

The Governor’s Office of Highway Safety sent out a couple of news releases Tuesday touting the fact that DUI task forces around the state made fewer arrests in connection to the Cinco de Mayo holiday. Specifically, police made 181 arrests over the weekend compared to 248 in 2007 and 209 in 2006.

The office’s deputy director, Michael Hegarty, said the lower numbers this year might demonstrate that fewer people are taking the risk to drink and drive. The numbers also fit the message that Gov. Janet Napolitano wants to send to justify her recent veto of a DUI bill that toughened some penalties but also would have reduced the requirement for first-time offenders to use ignition interlock devices on their vehicles from one year to six months.

But a more reasonable interpretation of these numbers is 2007 was an unusually high year for Cinco de Mayo arrests. This is supported by the fact that DUI task forces made many more traffic stops in 2007, 3,795 compared to 2,714 stops this year.

There needs to be another year or two of results before anyone can point to a real trend for DUI arrests connected to this Mexican holiday. This is especially true since the ignition interlock law has been in effect only since November.

Barry Goldwater Memorial in Paradise Valley (as found at flickr.com)

Barry Goldwater is headed back to Washington, D.C., or at least a future statue of him will be.

Gov. Janet Napolitano signed off today on House Joint Resolution 2001, which calls on Congress to replace one of two Arizona figures in the National Statuary Hall inside the House side of the nation’s Capitol. Goldwater, the legendary senator and one-time Republican presidential candidate, would replace John C. Greenway, for which Greenway Avenue in Phoenix is named.

At his death in 1930, Greenway was one of Arizona’s best known residents as a copper mine executive who developed an easier way to extract low-grade ore and extended the state’s hard-mineral boom. He also designed and built Ajo, a former mining town best known to Valley residents as a good place to fill the gas tank and to grab a bite to eat on the way to Rocky Point, Mexico.

Greenway is an obscure part of history now, and state lawmakers want Goldwater (who died in 1998) to have the honor of permanently representing the state at the U.S. Capitol as part of Arizona’s centennial celebration in 2012. Goldwater’s statue will join Father Eusebio Kino, the Spanish priest credited with establishing many of the early European settlements in Arizona through Catholic missions such as San Xavier del Bac just south of Tucson.

HJR2001 calls for construction and transportation of Goldwater’s statue to be paid for by private donations raised by the Arizona Historical Advisory Commission.

Sen. Jon Kyl

Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., wasn’t happy about a recent Tribune editorial urging caution in further expansion of the occasions when government can forcibly record a person’s DNA for future reference. The Tribune Editorial Board was reacting to a Kyl-sponsored law that directs the federal government to grab DNA samples from illegal immigrants before they are deported.

Kyl publicly tried to lay a guilt trip on us opinion writers by repeating his argument that the Chandler Rapist would have been caught sooner if DNA from the current defendant had been recorded when he was deported years earlier.

Of course, a close reading of the Tribune editorial will tell you that we weren’t objecting to this specific law, but to government’s eagerness to embrace DNA as a magic tool for solving more and more problems regardless of possible loss of personal and medical privacy.

But Kyl’s main point relies on flawed reasoning – there’s no guarantee that a DNA sample would have led to an immediate arrest after the Chandler Rapist attacked his first victim.

Monday’s news about a possible serial killer in Mesa illustrates this. Mesa police have used a national DNA database to link two murders and a violent assault to the same person. But the police still don’t know who they are looking for, and Police Chief George Gascon held a news conference Monday specifically to enlist the public’s help in identifying possible suspects.

As for the man accused of being the Chandler Rapist, obviously he already was doing his best to avoid the police without fleeing the area. Even if the police had been able to connect crime-scene evidence to a name in a DNA database, that wouldn’t have automatically put a suspect in jail. Investigators still would have had to track the man down.

DNA samples aren’t a silver bullet for criminals. They are another tool for law enforcement, one that must be used carefully and never should be treated causally by policymakers.

ASU Polytechnic would receive one of the new buildings in a proposed $1.4 billion construction package  (photo found at http://www.asu.edu/)

Arizona governors don’t often go before public hearings at the state Legislature to testify for or against bills and other issues. Since the governor is supposed to be an equal branch of government, office-holders want to avoid the appearance of begging for something from lawmakers.

So Gov. Janet Napolitano’s appearance Thursday before two Senate committees to support $1.4 billion in construction at the three state universities was somewhat rare. It reflects the intense pressure that the three universities and the state’s heavy construction industries are applying to get the measure passed, despite Arizona’s multi-billion dollar budget shortfall.

I’m absolutely baffled as to why the universities are so determined to get the entire package right now. Only about a third of the proposal would go toward maintenance and remodeling of current buildings, which the Tribune Editorial Board said Sunday should the Legislature’s primary focus. The rest of the money would add new buildings to the various campuses, including a new home for the Phoenix medical school, a new School of Construction for Arizona State University in Tempe and a new health sciences building at the ASU Polytechnic campus in southeast Mesa.

Sure, having the additional buildings would be nice. But the Arizona Board of Regents can’t even explain how the universities will pay for their share of the debt ($20 million out of a total $102 million a year), much less where the Legislature should find the rest of the money when it has to postpone routine payments to grade school districts just to balance the budget.