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

Arizona’s charter schools are indeed a success story for our state. Our leaders should be applauded for having the vision to carefully create a climate in which school choice benefits so many through specialized learning, improved test scores, and education options.

Arizona already licenses the full complement of health professions needed to offer patients an integrative approach to address chronic pain. It is time for health professions to work together for the best interests of our patients. Arizona has the physicians and practitioners needed to be at the forefront in developing integrative approaches to treating patients with chronic pain. Do we have the will to make it a reality?

Politics always gets heated in an election year. And Democrats and their well-funded activist army want to make tax cuts the wedge issue. That's fine. While they try to ride their shopworn talking points to victory, Arizona voters will respond with something real that's on the line: their bigger paychecks.

What if we provided substance abuse treatment from the point of admission, and cognitive behavioral treatment? What if we just started with drug possession offenders? Re-entry programs are showing significant promise in reducing recidivism and so are diversion and deferred prosecution programs utilizing substance abuse treatment and cognitive behavioral therapies. We should be implementing similar programs over the duration of an inmate’s incarceration.

If Arizona started on these reforms now and cut the prison population in half by 2025, we would have saved taxpayers more than $1 billion. That’s money that could be spent on education, parks, libraries, and health services. More importantly, if Arizona started on these reforms now, we would prevent countless people from entering a system that destroys lives, families, and communities. It’s time for Arizona lawmakers to invest in people, not prisons.

What Arizona’s charter school revolution has taught us is that educational approaches can be as diverse as the ever-changing needs of Arizona’s students. And thanks to our governor and state Legislature, those diverse needs are being served. It would be a shame for parents and students if the charter school revolution came to an end because a handful of anti-charter advocates managed to convince an even smaller group of reporters that Arizona neither needs nor deserves choice in education. After all, if charter schools were not doing a good job overall, why are so many students flocking to them?

In November, Arizona voters will decide whether expanding the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program makes sense. It was originally started to help the parents of disabled children, foster children, or parents who are active military. It evolved, with little controversy, to include adopted children, children attending D/F rated schools, and those in Native American communities. About 5,000 children are now using the scholarships to attend private schools or be home-schooled, if they don’t feel the public school system is right for their special, unique needs.

The recent New York Times article, “The Water Wars of Arizona,” goes into detail about Arizona’s diminishing water resources and blames the problem entirely on “lax regulation,” which, the author says, has enticed large corporate farms to come and suck up all the water. I’m sure they have. But “lax regulation” doesn’t come close to getting to the heart of the problem: water is too darn cheap in Arizona.

With such measurement instability, I don’t think the Efficiency Gap measurement can be considered a reliable indicator of the extent of partisan gerrymandering of Arizona election districts.

The Clean Power Plan overreached, in that it would have imposed massive costs on U.S. consumers. But it offered little gain in return. A fully implemented plan would have yielded only a theoretical 0.018 degrees Celsius reduction in global temperatures by 2100, and reduced power plants CO2 emissions by less than 1 percent.