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

While the Senate barely said a word about the budget bills, the House spent more than an hour debating their merits when they came up for a vote Nov. 23. It was a strikingly partisan debate on spending cuts to education and social services. At times it was adversarial. At other times it was just strange.

Gov. Jan Brewer, flanked by Senate President Bob Burns and House Speaker Kirk Adams, signed the special session bills just hours after they passed the House.

A Republican senator who had skipped a vote on four special session bills last week returned to the Capitol Nov. 23 to apologize for his absence and to vote in favor of the legislation to close a portion of the ...

Arizona’s largest teachers’ union has asked the state Supreme Court to overturn laws that affect the pay and retention of public school teachers. In a 32-page petition for special action, the Arizona Education Association argues that educational policy bundled into ...

Click here for up-to-the-minute updates on the Legislature's fourth special session. Our reporters will be at the Capitol all day (or all week, if it comes to that), tracking the progress of the four pieces of legislation in the House and Senate.

Standing between lawmakers and millions of dollars in budget cuts to education are three letters - M-O-E. Since Arizona started drawing federal stimulus funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, some lawmakers have decried the maintenance-of-effort, or MOE, requirements for portions of the money.

Senate Democrats are pushing to give schools on American Indian reservations the ability to access federal impact aid money to make up for state budget cuts to schools. A handful of Senate Democrats want the schools to have permission to ...

Federal stimulus money has saved more than 12,000 jobs in Arizona and laid the groundwork for a economic recovery built on information services and technology, Vice President Joe Biden said Nov. 16.

Brian Williams will take a short break from delivering the nightly news to millions of people across the country to accept a journalism award in Phoenix. Williams is set to accept the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism on Nov. 18.

A newspaper investigation has found that tuition tax-credit laws intended to help the needy attend private schools often go to students from middle- to upper-income households.