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Tag: Kimberly Yee

State treasurer hopefuls face off over land trusts, education funding in GOP primary

Key Points:
  • State treasurer manages  Arizona’s $32B in investments
  • Outgoing Treasurer Kimberly Yere endorses Katherine Haley 
  • Elijah Norton touts backing of Turning Point

State treasurer hopeful Elijah Norton is charging that his Republican primary foe is totally unqualified to manage the state’s $32 billion in investments.

During a televised debate May 19, Norton cited his experience as founder and CEO of what is now known as Veritas Global Protection, a company which sells extended warranties on vehicles. And that, he said, means he has to invest premiums in a way to ensure that the funds will be there when claims are made.

By contrast, Katherine Haley cites her experience as owner of Oak Rose Group, an investment advisory firm.

“We maintain balance sheets,” she said.

“We have to make sure we balance our checkbook every day,” Haley said. “We have to make sure we pay our bills.”

Norton sniffed at that.

“I think my opponent’s a lovely person,” he said.

“But this is about experience,” Norton said. “She’s not qualified frankly — and I mean this with all due respect — to be the bookkeeper at a pizza parlor.”

Haley responded that the job goes beyond deciding where to invest the dollars that come into the Treasurer’s Office. She said it also requires leadership and planning, both skills she says she has.

Beyond that, Haley said much of what treasurers can do with the dollars under their control is not on whim of the person heading the office but constrained by statutory restrictions as well as oversight by the State Board of Investment.

“At the end of the day, you are following state statute and also what is defined in the Constitution,” she said. And Haley chided Norton, saying he has said the state should manage its investments like Texas and Florida.

“They’re very different states,” she said.

What Haley said she does have is broader experience, including working as a policy adviser in Washington for Republicans John Boehner and Paul Ryan when they were speakers of the U.S. House. Norton dismissed both as “swamp rats,” a derisive term that had been used against both by some hardline conservatives to criticize more establishment politicians.

Haley’s view of the role of the office is also much closer to that of Republican Kimberly Yee, the current treasurer, who after serving two four-year terms, is now running for state superintendent of public instruction. And Yee told Capitol Media Services after the debate that whoever is in that office should not be making individual decisions on investments.

“The treasurer should be the manager of the agency and hire the best individuals qualified,” said Yee.

Haley made it a point during the debate to say she has been endorsed by Yee. Norton clapped back with his endorsements by the Free Enterprise Club, Turning Point and Senate President Warren Petersen.

Norton also dismissed the argument that it is the job of the treasurer to run the office and ensure it is staffed by the people who are the actual experts in their fields.

“We’re not trying to hire a glorified HR manager to manage unelected bureaucrats,” he said. “We’re electing the chief banking and investment officer of our state.”

Haley said all that is true, but that doesn’t mean Arizona should have a treasurer who has overly broad ideas of how to earn more money with the cash that the state needs to pay its bills.

“We cannot make risky bets,” she said. And Haley said what Norton wants is to “sell our portfolio to the highest bidder with the goal of, oh, perhaps, we’ll get higher yields.”

Norton makes no secret of his belief that the state could make more on the money it has invested.

He poked fun at Yee who, in press releases, said that the assets her office is managing nearly doubled from $15.4 billion in 2019 when she was first elected.

He said during that time there was growth in state population and property value, state lands were sold off and the proceeds put into the trust, and cities, who can invest through the Treasurer’s Office have gained the ability to tax internet sales.

“If you take our portfolio to somebody who actually understands investments, they’re going to say we should have about $3 billion to $5 billion more than we actually do,” Norton said.

“I’m not saying we should take risky bets,” he said. “I want to go to the office every day, do my job, and apply my experience to getting better returns for the taxpayers.”

One place where the treasurer has played a role — or at least has had some input — has been on the question of how much extra money can be withdrawn from the special education trust account.

Arizona received about 10 million acres of land from the federal government when it became a state in 1912, with the restriction that the land be held for the benefit of certain entities, primarily public schools. About 9.2 million acres remain, along with more than $10 billion the trust invested from sales and leases of the land.

A former formula in place for years gave schools 2.5% of the value of the trust annually, a figure that was designed to ensure level distributions without endangering the principal.

In 2016, however, voters narrowly approved Proposition 123, a measure to boost that annual distribution to 6.9%, generating an extra $300 million.

But that authorization has since expired. And lawmakers along with Gov. Katie Hobbs are now debating whether to ask voters to renew that rate — and at what level.

That’s where the views of the treasurer can come in.

The governor at one point proposed boosting the distribution to 8.9%, with GOP lawmakers proposing to keep it at 6.9%.

Yee has already weighed in, rejecting both proposals as unwise and saying the prudent figure would be more in the neighborhood of between 4% and 5%.

“We do have to protect the principal,” Haley said when asked her views on renewal. “It’s an endowment,” she said, having to last not just through today but well into the future.

“On average, an endowment distributes about 5%,” Haley said, saying she would consider that a safe figure going forward.

Norton blasted the numbers originally proposed by Hobbs as “absolutely ridiculous,” though the governor, in her proposed budget released in January, is not on the same page as the Republicans at 6.9%. But Norton refused to say, both during the TV appearance and when asked afterward, whether he agrees with that GOP figure — or what he believes would be the proper level of withdrawal going forward to both protect the trust and yet still provide more dollars for K-12 education.

What history has shown is the difficulty of making predictions of a return on investment on a long-term basis.

When Proposition 123 went to the ballot in 2016 it was opposed by Jeff DeWit, the state treasurer at the time. He predicted that the higher withdrawal would cut into the principal of the trust and ultimately leaves public schools with less money.

As it turned out, the economy — and the rate of return on investments — remained strong enough so that the principal actually increased even with the higher withdrawals.

Whoever wins the July 21 primary will face off against Democrat Nick Mansour.

Horne vs. Yee: Republican opponents square off over state education, ESA fraud

Key Points:
  • GOP foes in July 21 primary differ over handling of improper purchases using voucher funds
  • Yee changed her stated position on law covering school chief’s role
  • As state treasurer, Yee is not allowed to run for reelection

On May 13, State Treasurer Kimberly Yee lashed out at schools chief Tom Horne, saying a new report by the Auditor General’s Office “confirms my allegations of complete chaos within the Department of Education.

That report concluded that the agency, now under the control of Horne, could not show what action – if any — it took to review more than $500 million in “high risk expenditure transactions” in the state’s universal voucher program over more than two years. And that, said Yee, is at least part of the reason she wants Republican voters to choose her over Horne for state superintendent of public instruction in the July 21 primary.

“It shows that there was complete mismanagement of how they administer these funds,” Yee said in a televised confrontation with Horne on KAET-TV, the Phoenix PBS affiliate.

All this comes amid multiple reports that some parents of students with Empowerment Scholarship Accounts were using their funds for items of questionable, if not outright improper, items. These range from trips to foreign countries and theme parks to expensive pianos, jewelry, lingerie and high-end clothing.

Horne did not dispute the audit findings at the half-hour televised discussion.

But he did argue that his ability to police the expenditures of parents has been hobbled by state lawmakers who have not provided enough funds for proper oversight given the universalization of the program has ballooned its student enrollment from about 12,000 to 100,000 today.

And there’s something else.

He pointed out that Yee, in announcing her candidacy last year, questioned whether Horne — or anyone else heading the agency — actually has the authority to deny reimbursement to parents who claim that an expense has a legitimate purpose.

Horne said he has not seen his role that way, listing some of the things he said the Department of Education has refused to fund like a $5,000 Rolex watch, a $24,000 golf simulator, and even a vasectomy testing kit.

Yee responded that she never believed that these kinds of things should be reimbursed. And when Horne said that doesn’t match what she said about his authority last year, Yee responded, “Have you heard of fake news?”

In fact, Yee said in May 2025 — comments that are on tape — that the law that created vouchers limits the authority of a state school chief to overrule what a parent concludes is or is not an appropriate need for a child.

“As long as the state school superintendent and Department of Education follow that law I would be supportive,” she said.

And if the law is not clear?

“I believe the state superintendent, if there’s any question on how to administer the program, should not be making those exclusive decisions on his own,” Yee said last year. “He needs to go back to the legislative process which is appropriate and work with the Legislature to additionally add those protections.”

But Yee, when asked about that statement after the May 13 event, said she was referring to the fact that Horne, struggling to keep up with the flood of new requests for reimbursement, ordered his staff to automatically approve all purchases of less than $2,000, with the idea that they could be audited later and improperly paid amounts recovered.

“The Legislature didn’t tell him it was $2,000.”

Much of the rest of the discussion focused on how students in Arizona are doing.

“Nobody is satisfied with the state of education in Arizona,” Yee said.

“The person who is running the position has not gotten the job done,” she said. “And we see that not only in our test results, we see that in our graduation rates, we see that in declining enrollment. And parents deserve better.”

Horne said what Yee is leaving out of this is how poorly — relatively speaking — Arizona schools are funded by the state.

The World Population Review lists per pupil spending in Arizona in 2006 at $12,003. That puts the state at No. 47 nationally.

And a separate report by Learner, which connects parents with tutors, ranked Arizona even lower, with only Idaho spending less. 

But Horne said that, despite those numbers, Arizona “is in the middle of the pack” in standardized test scores, the same tests given in every state.

“So, when you’re last in funding and you’re in the middle of the pack with test scores … I think the schools deserve some credit for that,” he said.

The data, however, are a bit more mixed.

According to the 2024 results of National Assessment of Educational Progress, the most recent figures available, the average Grade 8 reading test score in Arizona is “not significantly different” than the national figures. But for Grade 4, the Arizona average was “significantly lower” than the national average.

Horne did not address the other issues.

Arizona does have a higher dropout rate than the national average — 77.3% versus 86.6%. But there has been little change in more than a decade.

And school enrollment has fallen for four straight years. Some of the reasons could be lower birth rates, with some districts closing schools.

Yee has her own theory.

“I believe there are so many families here that are leaving the public school system because they are not satisfied with what is happening in their schools,” she said.

Yee also said that the Department of Education needs “fresh, new ideas,” a not so subtle reference to the fact that Horne was state schools chief between 2003 and 2010 and got the job back in 2023 after a stint as attorney general. And she has an idea of what that includes.

“It’s very clear that we need to bring phonics back into the classroom for reading instruction,” Yee said, a reference to a method of teaching reading and writing that focuses on identifying the sounds of letters or groups of letters.

“Every school in Arizona teaches phonics,” Horne responded. “And it’s been the law since 2008.”

And that, he said, shows why Yee, who has been state treasurer for eight years and cannot seek reelection, should not be running for his current office.

“You’ve got someone challenging who’s completely ignorant about what’s going on in schools,” he said. “I challenge her to find a single school that is not teaching phonics in the classroom.”

Asked by conversation host Ted Simons to explain the discrepancy, Yee moved on to another subject.

“Well, I would like to get back to the basics on education,” she responded.

Both candidates said they oppose an initiative being promoted by the Arizona Education Association and Save Our Schools, an education advocacy group, which would put into law that families making more than $150,000 a year, adjusted annually for inflation, are ineligible for vouchers.

Whoever wins the primary between Yee and Horne will face off against the winner of a Democratic contest between Brett Newby and Teresa Leyba Ruiz. They faced off in a separate debate May 13 sponsored by the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission.

According to KTAR radio, both said they are foes of the current universal voucher system and would seek to scale it back if elected.

AG race heats up with candidates reporting millions in campaign funds

Key Points:
  • Republican Rodney Glassman claims to have most cash on hand in Arizona attorney general race
  • Glassman’s $3.3 million includes $1 million of his own money, campaign finance report shows
  • Democrat Kris Mayes, the incumbent, has raised over $3.7 million for reelection

Rodney Glassman, a Republican contender for attorney general, is boasting that he has more cash on hand than anyone else in the race. What Glassman does not say — and what his latest campaign finance report does not make clear — is that his $3.3 million war chest includes $1 million of his own money.

Still, that still leaves him more than both of his other GOP foes in the race combined.

But incumbent Attorney General Kris Mayes reports more than $2.8 million cash on hand from contributions alone, with no reported self-funding spent for another four years in office.

In broader strokes, Glassman has collected $2.3 million — not counting his personal loan — in the race, with about $268,000 in expenses so far.

Senate President Warren Petersen, in his own bid to be the Republican nominee, listed total contributions of more than $1.2 million. He, too, self-funded by providing $123,500 in loans to his campaign.

With expenses of about $106,000, that leaves him with $1.3 million in the bank — including his own money.

Also in the hunt for the GOP nomination is Greg Roeberg.

His latest campaign finance report lists more than $426,000 in donations, but $400,000 of that is a loan he made to his campaign on the last day of 2025.

He has about $416,000 cash on hand.

Mayes got to her $2.8 million in the bank with total contributions so far of $3.7 million. But she already has spent more than $1 million of that on her reelection bid.

The race for secretary of state is shaping up to be nowhere near as expensive.

Incumbent Democrat Adrian Fontes has collected more than $780,000 in donations against nearly $380,000 in expenses, leaving him with about $461,000 the bank.

Republican Alexander Kolodin, currently a state lawmaker, has collected about $249,000 against expenses of less than $22,000, with about $252,000 cash on hand.

In the contest for state treasurer, Republican Elijah Norton listed his total donations at $2.3 million. But of that, $2.1 million came out of his own pocket. And, after expenses, the amount he has listed in the bank pretty much matches that $2.1 million figure.

Democrat Nick Mansour has about $245,000 cash on hand after donations of more than $410,000 and expenses approaching $148,000.

Incumbent Republican Kimberly Yee, having served two terms, cannot run for reelection. But Yee now has her sights set on another office – that of state superintendent of public instruction.

Yee reported having collected more than $287,000 since entering the race against just $26,295 in expenses, leaving her with more than $257,000.

She hopes to beat incumbent Tom Horne in the Republican primary.

His donations so far are listed at about $416,000 against less than $20,000 in expenses, resulting in cash on hand of about $396,000.

Several Democrats have lined up to take on who survives the GOP primary.

The one with the most money in the bank is Brett Newby with $162,000, but only about $4,000 of that comes from donors, with the balance being his own money.

Teresa Ruiz lists donations of more than $117,000. She, too, has put her own money into the campaign, but just $10,000.

With expenses of about $68,000, that leaves her close to $49,000.

Also in the Democratic race is Michael Butts.

But he is taking only limited campaign donations in hopes of qualifying for public financing. If he gets 1,500 $5 donations he will be entitled to $147,836 for his primary campaign.

There also is a candidate from the Arizona Independent Party running for state schools chief.

Stephen Neal, who has put more than $1,000 of his own money into the race, has just $304 in the bank after listing receipts totaling $4,200.

GOP leaders squabble over school district’s financial woes

Key Points: 
  • Treasurer rejects $3 million advance for school district, cites mismanagement 
  • State superintendent disagrees, claims district is entitled to funds under state law 
  • District asks for reconsideration, blames high enrollment growth

Despite approval from the state Department of Education, Arizona Treasurer Kimberly Yee rejected a school district’s request for a $3 million cash advance to offset a deficit, alleging potential mismanagement and future financial instability. 

Yee claimed “grave concern” over alleged “gross financial mismanagement” at Nadaburg Unified School District, located in Wittman in Maricopa County, and pushed for an audit and potential receivership given lopsided revenues and deficit.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne disagreed with the move to withhold the cash advance as the district was entitled to funds under state law. 

The move puts Yee and Horne at odds over how to handle school districts in financial turmoil, as the two face-off in the 2026 Republican primary for superintendent of public instruction. And a request for additional review ropes in the district, the Joint Legislative Audit Committee, the auditor general and the State Board of Education.

“As Arizona’s Treasurer and a taxpayer watchdog, I am seriously concerned that an advancement of funds now will only compound the District’s deficit and harm the financial stability of the District for years to come,” Yee said in a statement. 

On July 31, the NUSD Governing Board alerted state officials to a $5 million estimated cash deficit, citing a low ending fund balance from the prior fiscal year and decreased property tax collections. 

The district then requested a $3 million advance of state aid funding to cover expenses through December, under a state law that allows early payment if sufficient funding, demonstrated financial need, and a sign-off from the state superintendent, treasurer and director of the state Department of Administration are present. 

The request only got an OK from the Department of Education. A spokesperson for the Arizona Department of Administration stated that they were notified of the request, but it was never formally submitted to the department for review and approval. 

Yee rejected the request on Sept. 24 and wrote the district had failed to provide any information on the necessity of expenses or any measures taken to reduce current spending to the bare minimum to sustain school operations. 

She claimed the deficit could be “indicative of gross financial mismanagement,” noting the FY2026 total budgeted local revenues sit at $1.7 million, which would make the projected deficit near triple the total amount of revenue the district expects to receive. 

“This is an alarming trend of financial instability,” Yee wrote.

Beyond notifying the district, Yee asked the Joint Legislative Audit Committee to issue a recommendation that the Arizona Auditor General’s Office conduct a special investigation of the district’s financials and requested the State Board of Education to consider any future findings from the auditor general to potentially appoint a receiver. 

Sen. Mark Finchem, chair of JLAC, and co-chair Rep. Matt Gress did not respond to a request for comment. Auditor General Lindsay Perry confirmed the office had received and is reviewing the letter. 

According to the January 2025 school district financial risk analysis by the Auditor General’s Office, NUSD was not listed as one of the highest risk districts but did have three red flags given a declining general fund operating reserve ratio, operating margin ratio and fund balance. 

Yee reserved the right to reconsider and asked for a more detailed explanation of the necessary expenses, funding sources and spending decisions that led to the cash advance request, as well as their impact on the ability to manage expenses within the last fiscal year. 

In departure from Yee, Horne said Yee’s denial of advance state aid was “pretty irresponsible.” 

“I disagree with her,” Horne said. “The district has had unexpectedly fast growth, and cash advances are fairly common. They are entitled to it under the formulas.” 

NUSD Superintendent Aspasia Angelou asked Yee to reconsider on similar grounds. 

According to the auditor general, Nadaburg saw a 12.9% increase in weighted student count over the past year and a 100% increase over the past four years. 

In a letter, Angelou said the “exponential enrollment growth” within the district was an exacerbating factor in the financial strain. 

“This growth has placed extraordinary demands on our classrooms, facilities, transportation services, and staffing, all of which remain focused on delivering high-quality education to our students,” Angelou wrote. “As a result, our resources are stretched during the critical period between July 1 and the dates when property tax revenues are deposited to the district in January each year.”

She added that the district disagreed with Yee’s “financial mismanagement” charge and pointed to efforts to restructure operations and eliminate administrative positions. 

“The ultimate risk in delaying or politicizing this decision is not borne by district leadership but by the students and families we serve, who rely on stable and uninterrupted school operations,” Angelou wrote. 

Yee says she’ll challenge Horne for state school superintendent

Key Points:
  • Horne angered the Freedom Caucus members when he denied some reimbursements
  • The fight for GOP nominee comes as lawmakers debate whether and how to continue Prop. 123
  • Yee complained about student achievement but offered no solutions

Unable to seek reelection, state Treasurer Kimberly Yee now wants to become the top education official in Arizona.

Yee said on May 28 she believes she could do a better job as superintendent of public instruction than fellow Republican Tom Horne. A state lawmaker before being elected treasurer in 2018 — she can serve only two four-year terms — Yee said students in Arizona are falling behind academically.

However, what appears to be driving her race — and that of supporters at a press conference — is Horne’s refusal to allow some parents who are receiving state funded vouchers to make expensive purchases he claims are not academically justified.

Horne has been a consistent supporter of vouchers, both for parents to use for tuition at private and parochial schools, as well as those engaged in various forms of home schooling. But he has run afoul of some voucher supporters after the Department of Education, which he runs, denied reimbursement to parents for items such as a $5,000 Rolex watch, a $24,000 golf simulator and even a vasectomy testing kit.

And it was that issue that led Sen. Jake Hoffman, chairman of the Arizona Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative Republicans, to ask Yee to run.

Yee said Horne had no right to deny the expenses.

“I believe in school choice and an educational free marketplace,” she said.

More to the point, Yee said that the law that created vouchers — formally known as Empowerment Scholarship Accounts — limits the ability of Horne or any other state school chief to overrule what a parent concludes is or is not an appropriate need for a child.

“As long as the state superintendent and Department of Education follow that law, I would be supportive,” she said.

And if the law is not clear?

“I believe the state superintendent, if there’s any question on how to administer the program, should not be making those exclusive decisions on his own,” Yee said. “He needs to go back to the legislative process which is appropriate and work with the Legislature to additionally add those protections.”

Anyway, she said, the examples that Horne and others have cited of improper expenses are just 0.01% of the total nearly $1 billion spent on vouchers.

Horne, for his part, said he and his agency are following the law. And that, he said, is based on two principles: is the expenditure for a legitimate purpose and is it at a reasonable cost?

In a prepared statement, Horne said the fact that the Parent Handbook doesn’t specifically bar the questioned expenses does not mean he is powerless to reject them.

“In writing a handbook, who could predict that someone would ask for a $5,000 Rolex watch?” he said.

“If the department had granted all requests as urged by the department’s adversaries, it would’ve been big news, the public would have reacted, and the survivability of the program would be in question,” Horne said. “Because the department strongly favors parental choice, the survivability of the program is a high priority.”

He also pointed out that any parent, denied reimbursement for an expense, can seek review by a hearing officer and, ultimately, the state Board of Education. Horne said none of those appeals have succeeded.

But Horne made it clear he recognizes the objections to the decisions his agency has made, not just from parents but also from some lawmakers.

“The department has been engaged with legislative leadership to reach a compromise,” he said. “And it is anticipated that a revised Parent Handbook proposal that is more favorable will result.”

At her press conference, Yee also complained that student achievement has faltered under Horne’s leadership and that many students who had been in schools prior to the COVID-19 pandemic had not returned, which she attributed to the Department of Education. But Yee offered no concrete proposals for how she would change that.

The fight to be the GOP nominee comes as state lawmakers debate whether and how to continue Proposition 123. Approved by voters in 2016, it has provided an additional approximately $350 million a year for K-12 education by making additional withdrawals from a special trust account.

That measure expires this year. And lawmakers have agreed to absorb that additional $350 million into the regular state budget.

Both Republicans and Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs want the additional trust fund withdrawals to continue, providing additional dollars to public schools.

But GOP lawmakers now want the measure to extend the withdrawals to also include a constitutional protection for vouchers. Hobbs, for her part, has declared that to be a non-starter.

Yee declined to take a stance on the GOP plan to link the issues, saying she hasn’t seen the details.

“I’ll take a look at what that proposal looks like going forward,” she said.

But Yee, in her position as treasurer — the person who oversees the trust account — already has registered one objection to the concept.

As crafted by Republicans, it would continue the current practice of withdrawing 6.9% each year from the “corpus” of the trust. That overrides the basic law which sets the annual withdrawal at 2.5%.

Yee, for her part, said it would be more prudent to take out less.

“I continue to advocate for the 4% to 4.5% distribution rate which is the industry norm for an endowment such as this,” she said.

“We don’t want to raid the program,” Yee continued. “We certainly don’t want to touch the corpus of the trust.”

So far, though, Republicans and the governor have pointed out that the trust continued to grow in the past decade even with Prop. 123 using a 6.9% withdrawal rate. Yee said if they insist on continuing to use that figure for the extension, there need to be “triggers” to lower the distribution if there is a change in the economy that endangers the financial soundness of the trust.

Attorney trying to block state funds for Prescott Rodeo derides house speaker

The attorney who is trying to block $15.3 million in state funds for the Prescott Rodeo is deriding House Speaker Ben Toma for his justification of why the spending is legal.

Nicholas Ansel said the position of the Legislature is that the appropriation is legal because, strictly speaking, the money was not given directly to Prescott Frontier Days but instead to state Treasurer Kimberly Yee. And she, in turn, was instructed to provide funding for the association that operates the rodeo.

Ansel told Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney, originally appointed by then-Governor Doug Ducey, that the explanation makes no sense.

Consider, he said, if state lawmakers decided to put a line in the budget giving $15.3 million to a specific McDonald’s restaurant in Phoenix. That, he said, would violate a constitutional provision that says that the general appropriations bill – the annual budget enactment – can only have funding for state agencies.

What Toma is proposing, Ansel said, is a workaround.

“According to the speaker, so long as the Legislature changed the appropriation to say ‘$15.3 million is appropriate to the treasurer to distribute to the McDonalds at Seventh Avenue and McDowell,’ then it magically become an appropriation ‘for’ the state treasurer,” he said.

“The court should reject this nonsensical position,” Ansel said. “Arizona law is clear: The Legislature cannot accomplish indirectly that which it could not accomplish directly.”

Ansel, who works for the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest, said even if that constitutional hurdle could be overcome, there’s another: the “gift clause” which bars lawmakers from giving money to private organizations without getting something in return.

The issue traces its roots to the budget adopted by lawmakers in 2023.

Flush with cash, legislative leaders gave each lawmaker a certain amount of cash – often between $20 million to $30 million – to allocate for projects.

Some of that $2 billion went to road improvements in their districts. Several pooled their cash for a one-time family tax rebate.

But there were other priorities, including $15.3 million for “a nonprofit volunteer organization that operates a rodeo at the Yavapai County fairgrounds.” But the understanding – not stated in the legislation – was the dollars were supposed to go to a $40.7 million master plan to renovate the rodeo grounds, which Prescott Frontier Days leases from the city.

Those dollars came from allocations given to state Reps. Quang Nguyen of Prescott Valley and Selina Bliss of Prescott.

That provoked a lawsuit filed in June 2023 by the Arizona Center for the Law in the Public Interest on behalf of Prescott residents Howard Mechanic and Ralph Hess, the latter a retired Yavapai County Superior Court judge. They charged it violates the Gift Clause because it “is not supported by any consideration, let alone a promise of significant direct benefits that serves a public purpose as required by … the Arizona Constitution.”

Ansel, however, said there’s a more immediate threshold issue: Was it even legal to put the spending into the budget in the first place.

Lawmakers apparently were aware of the issue: They worded the funding not to go directly to Prescott Frontier Days but instead to the treasurer who would give the money to that nonprofit that operates a rodeo. Ansel said the treasurer, having determined that Prescott Frontier Days was the only entity that would receive the funds, had planned to forward it the cash on July 1, 2023, the first date of the new fiscal year.

All that came to a halt when the lawsuit was filed nine days earlier.

Ansel told the judge that what Toma was saying was that this appropriation was no different than when lawmakers direct the treasurer to allocate funds for certain state agencies, something that is legal.

“According to the speaker, so long as the treasurer is tasked with paying out specific sums of money, the Legislature may include it in the general appropriations bill for any purpose whatsoever,” he wrote. “A billion dollars to the King of England? No problem, so long as the treasurer writes the check.”

Ansel does acknowledge the Legislature can appropriate money to non-governmental entities – as long as that is done in a bill separate from the general state budget to allow lawmakers to vote independently on the issue.

But he said even if lawmakers were to redo the allocation as separate legislation, that still wouldn’t make what is going on here legal. And that involves the Gift Clause of the Arizona Constitution which prohibits the use of public funds for private purposes unless the state gets “consideration,” meaning something in return.

Put another way, Ansel said lawmakers lack authority to just give away public dollars.

The state is fighting back with an argument that this isn’t an outright gift but simply authorization for Yee, as the treasurer, to award a grant that could have certain conditions.

That argument is flawed, Ansel said, because that’s not what is in the legislation which simply directed Yee to give the money out with no standards or policies. Nor does the measure delegate to Yee the power to enter into a contract where she would get to unilaterally decide what constitutes a public purpose.

What is going on, Ansel said, is an effort to argue that the ongoing fight to get the dollars to Prescott Frontier Days “with no strings attached” is something it is not – and never was.

“It was only after the Legislature was caught red-handed gifting away public monies – after this lawsuit was filed – that a team of attorneys concocted a plan to create a different deal and – without any legislative guidance or authorization – attach spending conditions and parameters to the rodeo appropriation before disbursing it,” he wrote. “But even well-meaning attorneys cannot retroactively authorize the treasure to do that.”

No date has been set for a hearing.

Yee pans Hobbs Prop 123 extension proposal

Gov. Katie Hobbs announced her plan to extend Proposition 123 and increase the percentage allocated from the state’s land trust to 8.9% to fund schools, raise teacher and school staff...

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Gallego, Kelly top Power Ranking poll

Two Democrats representing Arizona in Congress placed as the top two in a recent poll ranking the most favorable people for public office in the state.    A recent power ranking...

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Hobbs keeps donations secret for inauguration events

Democratic Arizona Governor-elect Katie Hobbs speaks at a victory rally on Nov. 15 in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Matt York) By Bob Christie Incoming Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs...

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Republican Treasurer Yee trounces Democrat

State Treasurer Kimberly Yee speaks July 24, 2021, at the “Rally to Protect Our Elections” hosted by Turning Point Action at Arizona Federal Theatre in Phoenix....

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Yee ahead in Treasurer’s race

From left Sen. Martin Quezada, D-Glendale, and Republican Treasurer Kimberly Yee Incumbent Treasurer Kimberly Yee currently holds a growing lead in the treasurer’s race over Sen....

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