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Governor’s school facilities committee criticized by unincluded Republican lawmakers

Arizona Republican lawmakers are criticizing Gov. Katie Hobbs for leaving key stakeholders out of a new committee analyzing school facilities, but it appears that all of those stakeholders are represented, apart from the lawmakers themselves.

The Governor’s Minimum Adequacy Modernization Committee is tasked with  updating guidelines on school facility standards Arizona’s Minimum Adequacy Guidelines were not updated for a long period until a few years ago. Some outdated standards were tossed out, like one rule requiring all classrooms to have a VCR.

School leaders want to finish updating the guidelines on points like technology and security.

But several Republican representatives say that Hobbs stacked the committee with allies. In a statement, they wrote, “the omission of Arizona’s citizens, lawmakers, school board members, parents, and taxpayers is a glaring oversight in public policy.” 

However, multiple committee members are citizens, taxpayers, parents and school board members. Only lawmakers themselves were omitted.

Chris Kotterman, a lobbyist for the Arizona School Business Association and member of the committee, said the Legislature could come into play when it comes to authorizing funding. 

“They'll have a chance to have their say. But I think the point of the Council is to allow the stakeholders to have the primary interest in the construction of school facilities to outline and have input into what those minimum standards need to be,” Kotterman said.

Kotterman said as far as he knows, every member of the council is an Arizona taxpayer and citizen, and at least one, Violeta Ramos, is a school board member. Several are also parents. 

“A number of the representatives on the Council said that they were, you know, their primary interest in school facilities was because they have children in the system or had children go through the system,” he said. 

Spending does appear to be the point of contention here. 

In the statement lawmakers issued this week, they said the committee, which has only met once, has the singular agenda of increasing spending for schools. 

“If they believe that we're trying to, you know, leverage this task force into making them spend more money on school facilities, I suppose they could be upset about that, but it's not a secret that ASBA thinks that school facilities are a priority,” Kotterman said.

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Camryn Sanchez is a field correspondent at KJZZ covering everything to do with state politics.