In her last year at the Arizona Legislature, Senate Minority Leader Katie Hobbs must balance running for higher office and leading the Democratic Caucus. The Phoenix Democrat has a few agenda items she would like to check off  her list before the end of the year, but as always, she’s not optimistic about her odds as long as the ruling party in Arizona is the GOP.

What’d you think of Governor Doug Ducey’s State of the State address?

(Heavy sigh) I just keep hoping that he’ll come out and say something bold and visionary that will move Arizona forward, and there’s a lot of nothing there. Not a lot of substance.

Was there anything about the speech you did like?

I think the fact that the governor’s taken a leadership role and decisive action around the opioid crisis is a good thing. I think it’s something we can work on in a bipartisan way. I give him a lot of credit for doing that.

Is that something Democrats will support?

I haven’t seen the final draft, but he’s been very inclusive in a way that I have not seen him be in his administration.

Any other areas of focus?

Education funding. I think that’s going to be, still, the big issue. I don’t see a lot of hope there in terms of really making a dent in the problem.

What would it take to make a dent, given that the governor has vowed not to raise taxes?

I think it’s a little unfortunate that he boxed himself into that corner, because there’s not really — we’ve taken all the money out of the couch cushions, so I don’t know where else you find enough funding to make the impact that needs to be made, so we’ll see.

But if there’s no money in the couch cushions, what’s there left to do?

My answer is, have an adult conversation about revenues and how we address the entire revenue pie and look at the revenue we need. Education isn’t the only need that we have. It’s certainly a driving issue, but it’s not the only thing we have. We underfunded roads, we’ve underfunded infrastructure all across the board. So I think we have to have a realistic conversation about revenue. That doesn’t necessarily mean raising taxes, it means looking at how do we make the revenue more stable. We can’t just keep going back to passing it off to voters with a sales tax, increasing it that way.
There was no mention of renewing the sales tax for education by the governor, though some groups — business leaders, Save Our Schools Arizona — are pushing that idea.

I haven’t talked to anyone on the Republican side about this. Specifically talking about Prop. 301 renewal, I think it’s frustrating that corporations benefited from this large tax reduction, and now it’s the business leaders who are coming back and saying it’s the taxpayers who need to pay more for education. There’s no question that Prop. 301 renewal needs to happen. We can’t lose that funding. Taxpayers have said they’d pay more for education. But I think it’s a fairness issue when you look at who’s coming back and saying we need this tax increase.

Do you think it hurts the message businesses are sending? That they’ve received such significant tax breaks?

I’m not saying it hurts their message. I’m saying, from our perspective, it’s a little bit disingenuous. The majority of Republicans, I can’t say what they’ll do. But if they’re not talking about it until 2020, that’s a long way off, and there’ll be a totally different Legislature here then.

What about Senate President Steve Yarbrough’s proposal to reduce the escalator on school tuition tax credits for corporations? Would you support it?

Hey, that’s a great idea! We’ve been proposing that for years! Years. It’s interesting that he retired from that job and now all of sudden that’s something we can have a conversation about… The devil’s always in the details. We’re not going to say we’re voting for something without seeing the bill. If it’s part of the budget package, we’ll have to see what else is in the budget package, if we’d be willing to vote for it or not.

What about water? Is that an issue that can be tackled this year?

The discussions that have been happening have been very untransparent for such a huge issue. We’re a state because we have water, so we can’t, I don’t think we can rush through decades of water policy, making changes to that, in the pace and sort of lack of deliberation that actually happens in a legislative session. That’s my biggest concern. Do some of these things need to be addressed? Absolutely. But I don’t think it was handled the right way from the beginning. I think that, when you look at the pace of the legislative session and the number of issues that we actually have to deal with, it’s really difficult to get up to speed and to have the necessary level of stakeholder meetings that need to happen, because not all the stakeholders were included already.

Do you think the Legislature will tackle vouchers again, given the referendum to repeal the expansion bill passed last year?

I can tell you there’s nothing I’d like to see more than vouchers being repealed by the voters, and all the hard work that was put into getting that referendum on the ballot, against all the odds. I think it’ll be interesting to see what happens legislatively without Senator (Debbie) Lesko, who was the sponsor of the bill here. And the Legislature could do something super sneaky, like repeal and replace, which would change maybe one word and totally invalidate the referendum.

You’ve got two jobs this year: Running the caucus and running for secretary of state. Is that tough to handle?

I’m certainly focused on the job of being leader. I intend to make that my top priority during session. I can walk and chew gum at the same time, and I think I’ve been able to manage that so far. I’m not anticipating it being a problem.

Any “swan song” bills you’d like to get through in your final year in the Senate?

What I would love to see versus the reality are two different things. Something that I wish would happen is non-discrimination for LGBT. Will that happen? Highly doubt it. But that would be something I’d love to see.