Since the recession that plagued the previous decade, Arizona has struggled to grow one of its biggest contributors to the economy: the construction industry.

Two Republican candidates for the Arizona Corporation Commission are asking pointed questions to the head of Arizona Public Service, wary that the utility is secretly aiding their primary opponents in the race for seats on the regulatory agency.

Arizona’s largest utility, Arizona Public Service, has expanded its scope of political involvement to include the election of another utility’s board of directors.

Residential and commercial builders’ groups are hopeful that a compromise on Arizona’s safety standards for construction workers will prevent a federal takeover of the state’s decades-old worker safety agency.

According to a report by Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business, 1,021 new single-family homes were sold in the Phoenix area during October, an 85 percent increase from the same month last year.

Mining companies and other businesses will be allowed to keep environmental studies secret, even if they detail possible pollution problems, under industry-backed legislation that gained final House approval Monday. Under the measure headed to Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, environmental audits generally could not be used as evidence in civil cases.

Six years ago, it was common for buyers to wait in front of new home sales offices to see who would win the privilege of purchasing one of the several lots the builder had selected to release for sale that day.

The Arizona Corporation Commission decided three years ago that homebuilders should pay the cost of extending power lines to new houses, but some lawmakers now want to go back to the way things used to be and force utility companies to foot the bill.

The Arizona Bankers Association's goal of clamping down on speculative investors who fueled the state's foreclosure crisis will have to wait, now that state lawmakers and Gov. Jan Brewer repealed contested foreclosure legislation passed earlier this year.