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Former lawmaker Hale dies
Albert Hale Former Navajo Nation president Albert Hale, who also served as a state representative and senator, died Tuesday after battling with Covid, the Navajo Nation...
Tag: doug ducey
Bill gives Legislature some control of utility regulators
The Arizona Corporation Commission may be the next branch of government that legislators can force the Attorney General to investigate. Rep. Jacqueline Parker, R-Mesa, the new Legislative District 16 representative...
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Details emerge on gambling expansion
OK. So you think Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray will rush for at least 75 yards in an upcoming game.
Wanna bet on it?
That would become legal in Arizona under the terms of a plan by Gov. Doug Ducey. And you’d even be able to do that from your phone.
Also look for legalized wagering on “fantasy” leagues. If keno is your thing, that, too, would be available — but not everywhere.
And there could be more tribal casinos with more kinds of games.
It’s all in the details obtained Monday by Capitol Media Services about the multi-pronged proposal which would vastly expand what kind of legal wagering can occur here, both on and off-reservation.
But this is about more than providing easier access for Arizonans for a way to wager.
Most notably, the plan — and the deal Ducey has negotiated with tribes who currently have the exclusive right to most forms of gaming in Arizona — would generate new dollars for the state while allowing the governor to keep his promise of not raising taxes. In fact, depending on the revenues, they even could help Ducey finally get closer to his multi-year promise of moving the state’s income tax rate as close to zero as possible.
It’s a truly complex deal.
On one hand are the tribes.
Under the terms of a 2002 initiative they crafted and got voters to approve, they have been able to operate casinos in exchange for giving the state a share of the profits. That generated $31.7 million in the most recent quarter.
Sen. T.J. Shope, R-Coolidge, who is sponsoring one of the versions of the plan, told Capitol Media Services that more casinos and more games, like craps, might keep people in Arizona with more options to gamble closer to home.
“Obviously, the allure of Vegas is always going to be there,” Shope said. “I, myself, go a handful of times a year.”
But he also figures that there is an audience for local expanded gaming. Consider, Shope said, people who come to town for spring training or the Phoenix Open.
“For that person that is interested in doing something in the afternoon and evening when the ballgame’s over, they’re going to be able to go ahead and have that option,” he said.
That same revenue-sharing formula by the tribes would remain in place for the next 20 years. But more casinos and more games would presumably generate more dollars.
But the really big bucks — no one from the governor’s office is giving out figures — could come from the state’s share of newly authorized off-reservation gaming if the legislature approves.
Shope acknowledged this will result in a sharp increase in what’s legal in types of gambling in Arizona. But he said that it is, at least in part, an acknowledgment of reality.
Take fantasy league wagering.
“Fantasy sports has been played for years,” Shope said.
In essence, players “draft” real players for a fake team they have created. Then your team “plays” another fake team, with the winner decided based on a point system. This would involve having the state license the major players like DraftKings and, presumably, get a share of the wagering.
And it’s not just football and baseball. Those online sites permit wagering on everything from basketball and hockey to golf, soccer and NASCAR racing.
The bigger change involves being able to bet on collegiate and professional games.
The door to that was opened in 2018 when the U.S. Supreme Court voided the 1992 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. That federal law made it illegal for states to legalize sports wagering.
Ducey said in 2019 he was interested in having Arizona move into that territory.
But that was not a legal option here as a result of that 2002 initiative which not only gave tribes the right to operate casinos for the next 20 years but also specifically barred the state from implementing any form of gambling that did not exist at the time.
With those compacts expiring, that opened the door for Ducey to renegotiate.
For college sports, the only permissible form would be be betting on the outcome of a game.
But for those seeking a bit more excitement, the law also would allow “prop bets” on professional games.
Short for “proposition bets,” these encompass pretty much anything other than the ultimate result or point spread. More to the point, they focus on the performance of an individual player.
The “where” of all that is a bit more complex.
What Ducey is proposing involves 20 licenses, with half reserved for the tribes. The other half will be divided up among Arizona sports teams or franchises.
So the Cardinals would be able to get one, as would the Diamondbacks, the Suns, the Coyotes, NASCAR and the Professional Golf Association. And they, in turn, would contract with secondary locations to serve as off-track betting parlors.
There would, however, be the option to actually sit at home — or anywhere — and bet by phone. That pleases Shope.
“The ease of being able to do it by phone is something that is definitely a desire from I think the average person that does this sort of stuff,” he said.
Shope described himself as “a big sporting nut.”
“Not everybody is going to do something like that,” Shope explained. “But there is an appetite, I believe, to engage in this out there.”
For those interested in something a bit different, the new deal negotiated by Ducey and now awaiting legislative approval also includes keno.
It’s kind of a lottery game, with bettors choosing numbers, but conducted far more frequently, potentially multiple times per hour. But until now, like sports wagering, the 2002 tribal compacts forbid the state from offering it.
But don’t look to be able to make those bets from anywhere — or even where you can now buy a Lottery ticket. The plan gives that exclusive right to “fraternal organizations” like the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Elks Club and other similar sites.
Shope said the restriction is justified. He said these organizations have been “suffering across the country” as younger people — he is 35 — aren’t “into doing that kind of thing anymore.”
“That’s why you see memberships in all these groups dwindling,” he said. Shope said he’s willing to help out — and give them the exclusive right to make money off of keno — because “they do a lot of good for the community.”
It will still be the Arizona Lottery ultimately running the games and spitting out the winning numbers. And, like casino wagering, fantasy leagues and sports betting, the state will get a share of everything wagered.
In some ways, the odd-man out are the state’s horse tracks. The deal Ducey negotiated with the tribes precludes them from operating “racinos,” essentially allowing some forms of casino gaming.
But Shope said they had their chance.
He pointed out the tracks put their own initiative on the 2002 ballot, one that would give both them and the tribes the chance to operate casino games.
“It was resoundingly defeated,” Shope said.
Choice of getting Covid shots related to politics
Nearly a month after vaccines have become available here a quarter of Arizonans remain unwilling to get inoculated against Covid.
And there is a political component to all of this.
A new survey by OH Predictive Insights finds that those who identify as Democrats are more likely to roll up their sleeves for a vaccine approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration than Republicans. Just 17% of Democrats told pollster Mike Noble they have no intention of getting inoculated versus 29% of Republicans.
Still, the numbers in the survey conducted earlier this month show some progress. When Noble last ran the poll in September, before there was an approved vaccine, 38% of Arizonans said they wouldn’t take it, even if offered for free.
But the director of the Arizona Public Health Association said the 25% overall refusal rate that remains among Arizonans, even after inoculations have started, could delay the state reaching “herd immunity.” That’s the point at which sufficient people have either been vaccinated or already have contracted the virus to prevent wholesale spread among those who have not.
And Will Humble said this could become even more crucial now that new more contagious strains of the virus are now beginning to pop up in the United States.
Noble’s poll shows much of the attitude about getting inoculated is linked to how much risk anyone believes the virus poses.
He found that 68% of those who are extremely or moderately concerned about contracting Covid are willing to get vaccinated. By contrast, 44% of those who express only slight or no concern will agree to inoculation.
And that, Noble found, has a high correlation with politics – fewer than half of Republicans say they’re concerned, versus 82% of Democrats.
“Probably, a lot of that’s tied back to the former president,” Humble said.
“He has made many statements suggesting that this was not a serious thing in terms of public health,” Humble continued. “And there are so many people who see him as an oracle of knowledge that they adopted what he has said.”
There have been efforts to convince people about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine.
“Governor Ducey wants Arizonans to get vaccinated,” said C.J. Karamargin, press aide to the Republican governor. “When it’s his turn, the governor will be getting the vaccine.”
Ducey has in some ways staked his reputation in fighting the virus on people getting vaccinated.
He has refused to implement new mitigation measures and restrictions on individual and business activities even as the state entered a second wave of infection, relying on the virus being tamped down by Arizonans getting inoculated.
Through January 27, the state Department of Health Services reported there were 459,399 individuals who had received just their first of two doses. Another 85,533 had gotten both shots.
“It is, as the governor has said many times, the light at the end of the tunnel,” Karamargin said.
Steve Elliott, spokesman for the health department, said one thing that may build confidence is that, as more people get inoculated, they share their stories.
“Arizona will have large numbers of influencers sharing that the vaccines are safe and effective,” he said. And Elliott said his agency will have its own campaign explaining the benefits, both broadly and with messages targeted to specific groups and those disproportionately impacted by the virus.
But Humble said none of that may matter among people who, vaccine safety or not, don’t see Covid as a risk.
“For people of a certain age that have established their opinion about this, I don’t think there’s much that can shift them short of perhaps former President Trump sounding the alarm,” he said. “That might change the minds of some of them.”
Noble agrees, suggesting that much of the change has to start at the national level, but that it goes all the way down the chain.
“It hinges very much on Republican leadership talking about the virus and the issues in order to ultimately mitigate or change perceptions of Covid among the GOP,” Noble said.
All that still leaves the question of whether Arizona can reach herd immunity given the number of nay-sayers to vaccines.
The good news, Humble said, is that Covid is not as communicable as measles.
That particular disease, he said, requires a 95% vaccination rate to keep it from spreading like wildfire. And while there are families that decide not to vaccinate their children – and Arizona has among the broadest exceptions parents can claim – “the families that do vaccinate their kids carry the load.”
The same is true, Humble said, of what will happen with the coronavirus.
“Those of us who do get the vaccine are going to carry the load and those who have been infected,” he said. “That’s going to take us halfway to herd immunity.”
Still unclear, though is at what point the state and the country get there.
“What we had believed is that we needed to get to 65% to 70%,” Humble said. But that was before the virus started mutating into new, more contagious strains, with the UK variant believed to be 40% more transmissible.
“That might move our herd immunity up to 80%,” he said.
Humble said one other problem of getting to that point goes beyond personal desires.
He said it appears that many of the people who have so far managed to get appointments are those who may be more educated and affluent – and capable of navigating what has often been confusing websites and getting the slots as they have opened up.
“Well, if you’re a working person or if you don’t have good WiFi or a new computer or any of the above, you missed your opportunity to get that February appointment,” Humble said.
“And even if you did get an appointment, these are mostly drive-up pods,” he continued, further exacerbating the disparity between the haves and the have-nots.
The online opt-in survey of 1,022 individuals was conducted from January 11 to January 18 from a statewide voter registration sample and was weighted to reflect gender, region, age, party affiliation and ethnicity. It has a margin of error of 3.1%.
Ward, Terán take different ways to lead parties
GOP lawmaker urges colleagues not to end Covid restrictions
New IRC chair wants to avoid tiebreaker role
Erika Neuberg will be the chair of the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission and serve as a tie-breaking vote on decisions that will impact the state’s political landscape over the next decade.
The commission voted for her unanimously and nobody else received a motion to be selected.
“I’m deeply honored by this selection and I truly view this as a collective vote of confidence in the legitimacy and independence of our process by all parties involved,” Neuberg said after taking her oath of office. “I have the greatest belief Republicans, Democrats and independents will be very fairly represented and will have a voice in this process.”
Neuberg, a psychologist who is a former national board member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, said in her interview with the four other commission members on January 14 that she wants to avoid being a tie breaking vote, which has been common in the two previous cycles of the commission showing its partisan nature.
Neuberg joins Democrats Shereen Lerner, from Maricopa County, and Derrick Watchman, from Apache County, and Republicans David Mehl, from Pima County, and Douglas York, from Maricopa County, who were selected by the legislative caucus leaders in 2020.
Watchman was unanimously selected as the vice chair.
The partisan members immediately began in their unpaid roles last week at a deadlock while trying to pick an interim chair to conduct the first meeting. The Democrats eventually gave in and selected Mehl to serve on an interim basis until Neuberg was selected. But the deliberation on January 21 only had unanimous votes.
“If I’m your chair, some 3-2 votes might be necessary, but if it’s always 3-2 — and especially if it’s always in one direction, that’s a warning sign. So, my success would be a robust majority,” Neuberg said in her interview.
Out of the five politically independent finalists, Neuberg was viewed as the most political, but not partisan, based on her strong connections she has made through her role at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which promotes a pro-Israel policy agenda. She has contributed to the campaigns of dozens of U.S. Senate and congressional candidates from both major parties and touted her relationship with Republican Gov. Doug Ducey through his connection to the pro-Israel organization as well. She said Ducey used to be an American Israel Public Affairs Committee club member.
Neuberg said she has since broken away from the committee after she decided to apply for the Independent Redistricting Commission last year.
She was one of four independent finalists the Arizona Democratic Party had a problem with given her political contributions to Ducey and other Republicans, but the party left out her contributions to Democrats, including several from Arizona.
Neuberg brushed off their complaints as part of the process and quipped about how “the other side” also had problems with her.
“If you study my history, I’ve never done the quantitative analysis. I don’t know if I’ve given more to one party or not. Every check is with an explicit motivation to advance the U.S. Israel relationship,” she said.
Neuberg said she views herself as “politically agnostic” and sees the division in today’s political climate as “what is not right about our country.”
For how she will handle the role as the chair — which is viewed as the most important political figure in the state as the commission draws maps for Arizona’s 30 legislative districts and the eventual 10 congressional districts — Neuberg said it’s important that “minorities must have representation.”
There are six factors in the state Constitution that the IRC must consider for districts:
- Being in compliance with the U.S. Constitution and the Voting Rights Act.
- Ensuring all districts are roughly equal in population.
- Appearing compact and contiguous
- Respecting communities of interest.
- Incorporating visible geographic features.
- Being electorally competitive as long as the aforementioned criteria are satisfied.
Neuberg said the first four are the most important and following them in that level of importance will help with the commission’s success. That was something she felt lacked in the 2011 IRC.
“I believe the last commission went into this with the purest of motives and worked super hard. I think they got a little tripped up on this distinction because I think they prioritized competitive districts,” Neuberg said. “When you start messing with the Constitution, or your interpretation of it, it creates other problems. So I think they did a good job maybe creating a few competitive districts, but it certainly came at the expense of some of those other principles.”
Neuberg said she hopes the five commissioners can trust each other, create fair maps and that the process will not get litigious.
The IRC will next meet on February 2 at 9 a.m. to discuss training, the process to select an executive director and discussions regarding mapping consultants and legal counsel. This commission is ahead of schedule since the new census data won’t be available until the end of February, allowing the members to focus on hiring key positions in the meantime.
Neuberg beat independent nominees Robert Wilson, Thomas Loquvam, Gregory Teesdale and Megan Carollo with her appointment.
Ducey speech confuses, alarms schools leader, teachers
The divide between Gov. Doug Ducey and the state schools chief and teachers grew after his Jan. 11 State of the State speech.
Ducey threw the education community into chaos when he said “we will not be funding empty seats or allowing schools to remain in a perpetual state of closure.”
Superintendent of Public Instruction Kathy Hoffman and many public education interests and journalists interpreted the line of the address to mean he wants to end funding for virtual learning.
“Children still need to learn, even in a pandemic,” Ducey said.
Hoffman said immediately after the speech that Ducey is ignoring the worsening spread of Covid and its severe effect on students and teachers and that he was contributing to the “toxic environment where teachers, board members, and superintendents are harassed for making data-driven decisions.
Richie Taylor, the communications director for Hoffman, said the Department of Education was as confused as everyone else after the speech – mainly because the governor hadn’t communicated with Hoffman’s office beforehand.
“Our initial understanding was that they were going to defund distance learning,” he said.
Ducey’s office quickly clarified that Ducey is not advocating to rip away funding for schools in distance learning, instead saying he was promoting Arizona’s longstanding policy of allowing parents to choose school districts and directing funding to follow the students to whatever school their parents choose.
“This misunderstanding and this confusion could have been avoided if they had reached out and told us what they were going to say,” Taylor said.
In an interview with Arizona Capitol Times on January 13, Hoffman said she has found it difficult to work with Ducey lately because he won’t include her or any other school leader before he makes announcements that affect the education community. She said she has not spoken to Ducey directly for quite some time.
Ducey and his team have made a habit of not communicating with stakeholders or warning education officials about pending announcements, including in October, when Ducey claimed he was working with school leaders to modify the health benchmarks for reopening. Hoffman immediately stated she did not ask for the modification, nor did any other school leaders – Ducey’s office had to walk back that claim.
“We always want to have ongoing communication with the Governor’s Office,” Taylor said. “Things work better when we are working together for the education community and for students and teachers.”
The alliance Hoffman and Ducey built early in the pandemic has now soured, Hoffman said, and it has put her in the position of taking the state’s top elected official to task over decisions she does not agree with in the area in which more than 1 million people elected her to lead.
Hoffman said the overall tone of his speech was “disrespectful to teachers” and that she wasn’t satisfied with his office’s response to the “empty seats” flub. She noted that the state is only funding students taking advantage of virtual learning at 95% of the level as in-person students, even though virtual learning is more expensive because many students need laptops and wifi, and teachers need training on how to conduct a class virtually.
“We currently have a budget surplus for the state as well as the $1 billion rainy day fund. So there is no excuse to not fully fund our schools,” Hoffman said, adding that she wished Ducey had focused on policy solutions in the speech.
She mentioned tensions are still high over the governor shorting some schools that were set to earn enrollment stabilization grants, and didn’t think it was a major request because of where the state is financially.
“The majority of our schools are either in some sort of hybrid or distance learning mode right now. So I think our schools need to hear that commitment. I would have also liked to hear a commitment to make up for that to make up for those dollars,” Hoffman said. “Why not use the funding that was already budgeted for schools to make their budget whole.”
Hoffman has repeated that she didn’t think Ducey was doing enough for teachers with everything they’ve had to go through during the pandemic adding onto an already stressful job, especially in Arizona.
She said it was just another part of his speech that “disappointed” her.
Hoffman said she wouldn’t go as far as saying Ducey doesn’t care about the teachers, something teacher groups have claimed on social media, but she said he’s just not accessible likely because of how divisive everything has been.
Hoffman and Ducey led together to manage schools when the state of emergency began, but cutting communication with her soured the relationship, she said, citing his ignoring of health benchmarks and cutting the funding of the stabilization grants as two examples that caused her and education officials to lose trust in his ability to lead.
The greatest disappointment, she said, is how Arizona is having the worst outbreak right now and nothing is being done to help.
“I’m just having a hard time understanding how the governor is not seeing the connection or the impact that [Covid] is having on our schools and their ability to be in-person,” she told Capitol Times. “It’s that disconnect that makes it really hard for me to work with him.”
About half of Ducey’s speech addressed Covid and his administration’s efforts to manage public health and the economy during the pandemic.
Ducey seeks expansion of gaming to allow sports betting
Ducey defends Covid response, offers short list of legislative priorities
In delivering his shortest State of the State address to date, Gov. Doug Ducey made Covid the dominant theme of his speech on Monday, although he hinted at a host of legislative priorities for 2021.
The theme of this year’s speech was #AZResilient, (following previous themes #AZAwesome, #ThingsThatMatterAZ and #The ArizonaWay), and Ducey highlighted that resilience theme by offering praise to doctors, nurses and other health care workers on the front lines who have helped care for Covid patients for months.
Ducey said the 10,000 Arizonans who died due to Covid is an example of the best not being enough.
“In so many ways, an extremely tough year brought out the best in us. And yet sometimes, despite all, our best wasn’t enough,” Ducey said remotely from his office. Arizona’s Covid numbers show 10,147 deaths so far and more than 625,000 known positive cases. Hospitalizations almost hit 5,000 today, which is the highest it’s been to date.
But the governor noted that with the vaccine here, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.
“If last year was the year of the virus, this year will be the year of the vaccine,” he said.
Ducey said there are extremists on both sides – those calling for a lockdown and those calling to reopen everything – but said he’s going to stick to his centrist path.
“In my 50-plus meetings with the press, I’ve heard endless variations of the same question: Why not more and longer lockdowns?” He said, adding said Arizona has never been under a lockdown, and it’s not something anybody should expect to happen.
“Look at the experience of the other states that did lockdown. What do they have to show for their strict mandates and orders? They’re still dealing with the worst of it. Just as we are,” Ducey said.
House Minority Leader Reginald Bolding, D-Laveen, said he and the other Democrats still had many questions after listening to Ducey’s speech. He contrasted Ducey’s more general statements on COVID-19 with the more specific proposals the Democratic leadership touted in a news conference this morning, such as extending the eviction moratorium and making it easier for Arizonans to collect unemployment benefits, among other areas.
“My hope is the governor is able to look at the comprehensive approach that we put (forth) and compare it with whatever he’s working on so we can move forward with this crisis that is affecting many Arizonans,” Bolding said.
He took a shot at mayors who’ve clearly gotten under his skin.
“I’m not going to hand over the keys to a small group of mayors who have expressed every intention of locking down their cities,” he said, referring to Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego and Tucson Mayor Regina Romero, who have been harsh critics of Ducey’s management of the crisis.
Arizona is the current worst spot in the world for new cases per capita and continues to hit records for hospitalizations and other metrics that show a bleak future reliant on the vaccine.
The speech, which clocked in at just 22 minutes, compared to last year’s 64-minute speech and the previous year’s 39-minute speech, was light on policy proposal , but included a few hints of what might be coming in his budget proposal Friday, including “eliminating unnecessary state buildings.” He also spoke about more tax cuts, Covid liability protection for businesses, modernizing the gaming compact, expanding access to broadband internet as well as offering laptops and wi-fi to students who don’t have access.
Ducey said he’s not going to provide any additional cash to public schools who have found themselves with fewer children in classrooms due to the pandemic. Instead, the governor said he wants to get students “back where they belong.”
“With every public health professional, from Dr. Fauci and the CDC on down, saying that the safest place for kids to be is in schools, we will not be funding empty seats or allowing schools to remain in a perpetual state of closure,” he said. “Children still need to learn, even in a pandemic.”
After the speech, press aide C.J. Karamargin said his boss is not considering cutting off funds to schools who instruct students either in whole or in part online. He said Ducey supports virtual options for parents who want them.
“When he references not funding ’empty seats,’ he simply means that for parents who have chosen a new option for their kids, the money will follow that will follow that student to their new public school,” Karamargin said, options that include other traditional district schools as well as charter schools.
Notably, Ducey did not mention any of his priorities from 2020 that did not come to fruition due to a truncated session. Several, if not all, are likely to come back in one form or another this year, but will take a backseat to his and the Legislature’s Covid response.
Ducey announced last year he would shut down the state prison in Florence — which came as a surprise to everyone, including Florence. The plan was riddled with unanswered questions, but was supposed to happen over a three-year period. It’s unclear how Covid affected that timeline and if any progress has been made, given prisoners and correctional officers testing positive for the virus.
Ducey pushed an education program he dubbed “Project Rocket” that would appropriate money to low-income, low-performing students in K-12 schools in an effort to close the achievement gap. However, that failed to launch as Democrats and some Republicans wanted to amend it last year.
Ducey’s budget plan will come on Friday, and given his nod to the achievement gap in his speech, it’s possible he’ll set aside money for it.
Reporter Nate Brown and Capitol Media Services contributed to this story.
Covid, unrest affect look, feel of legislative session
Supporters of President Donald Trump gather to protest at the Arizona Capitol, Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin) The 2021 legislative session...
