Arizona Capitol Times Your Inside Source for Arizona Government, Politics and Business

The Attorney General’s Office today confirmed that it is investigating whether House Speaker David Gowan misused state vehicles and improperly billed the state for miles he shouldn’t have been reimbursed for.

In her quest to reform the state’s public safety pension system, Sen. Debbie Lesko has been credited with accomplishing a Herculean task.

A jubilant Senate claimed victory on a historic public safety pension overhaul on Thursday, passing a long-awaited and hard-bargained package of reform bill out of the chamber with unanimous support.

Flanked by Senate President Andy Biggs, local officials and a coalition of various public safety groups, Republican Sen. Debbie Lesko on Tuesday publicly unveiled the much-anticipated legislation to overhaul the Public Safety Personnel Pension System.

A few hours before a landmark overhaul of the state’s pension system for police officers and fire fighters was set to be publicly unveiled by a senator who negotiated the legislation with union and city officials over the past year, some stakeholders were summoned to a meeting in the House, where multiple sources said competing legislation might be offered.

Each year without failure since the onset of the Great Recession, Democrats have denounced cuts to public education and clamored for more funding for K-12 schools, a demand that has gotten louder as the state’s economy improves.

The Arizona Capitol today turned into a beehive of activity, as Republican and Democratic legislators were briefed about the details of a proposed plan to settle a five-year lawsuit over education funding.

Arguing it would strengthen rather than diminish the institution of marriage, a divided U.S. Supreme Court today ruled that same-sex couples have a right to marry anywhere in America.

Arizona sits atop the list of states that have made the deepest cuts to higher education and have enacted the largest tuition increases in the nation since the start of the recession.

All 90 lawmakers kept their noses clean through the legislative session, marking 2014 as one of the rare years when a personal legal trouble didn’t become an issue at the Capitol.