KJZZ’s Friday NewsCap revisits some of the biggest stories of the week from Arizona and beyond.
To talk about GOP lawmakers wanting more information on an investigation into Gov. Hobbs, the data center debate coming to Arizona and more, The Show sat down with Doug Cole of HighGround and Democratic strategist Tony Cani.
Transcript
ANNOUNCER: KJZZ’s original production The Show is supported by Banner Health, Arizona’s largest nonprofit healthcare system. Last year, Banner reinvested more than $1.1 billion in community health and charity care. Banner Health, nonprofit for Arizona.bannerhealth.com/nonprofitforaz.
MARK BRODIE: Hi, I’m Mark Brodie, and this is the Friday NewsCap podcast. Each week, we review the biggest stories week with experts, reporters and commentators to put the news in perspective.
Here’s this week’s episode:
ALEXANDER KOLODIN: There’s no doubt that confidence in our elections here in Arizona is at an all-time low, and the responsibility for that rests squarely on the shoulders of Secretary Fontes.
ADRIAN FONTES: You were one of the folks who was the architect of “the big lie” here in Arizona. You’re the one who has caused the misinformation and distrust. You’re like the arsonist who causes the fire and then says you’re going to come in and cure things.
T.J. SHOPE: It seems like what we received late last week from the AG’s office was anything but complete. I feel that that is — and that’s one of the reasons why we’re here asking for the files today.
KATIE HOBBS: I am again going to refer you to the letter that we sent to the AG as part of this investigation, and everything that’s required to be reported, we have reported.
RUBEN GALLEGO: I really do deeply regret some of the statements that my country has made about Canadian participation in terms of both supporting us in some of our fights at coalition, past sacrifices of Canadians.
ANDY BIGGS: Packing the court is not simply a policy disagreement. It is an attempt to change the structure of one of the three branches of government in order to guarantee the outcome you want. That’s not reform. That’s revolution.
MARK BRODIE: And joining me to talk about GOP lawmakers wanting more information on an AG investigation, the data center debate coming to Arizona, and more are Doug Cole of High Ground. Doug, good morning.
DOUG COLE: Good morning, Mark.
MARK BRODIE: And Democratic strategist Tony Cani. Tony, good morning to you.
TONY CANI: Good morning.
MARK BRODIE: So Doug, let’s talk about a group of GOP lawmakers this week who are asking — maybe asking is not quite strong enough of a word. They would like to see the investigative files from Attorney General Mayes into the investigation that her office did into Sunshine Residential. This is the alleged pay-to-play scheme involving Gov. Hobbs.
Mayes did not find that the governor did anything wrong. There’s no reason to bring charges. It seems like the Republican legislators — including, we should point out, Warren Petersen, the Senate president, who is running against Kris Mayes for attorney general — they want to see the work here.
DOUG COLE: Well, let’s also keep in mind that there are other investigations going on, also. There’s the auditor general’s investigation, which the Legislature controls the auditor general, and also Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell is also running an investigation.
MARK BRODIE: She’s working with the auditor general. And House Republicans are also running an investigation.
DOUG COLE: Exactly. So you have all of these other entities that are also running investigations, and you’re working with the same database and group of documents. So it becomes, just from an integrity of those other investigations, it becomes very difficult to do a data dump from one investigation while those other investigations are going on.
But the big picture is here, it is now September. Early ballots are about 30 days from being mailed, which means that’s when the election starts. And everything becomes hyper-political. This has been going on for years, and no one’s been able to draw, to date, a direct line to Gov. Hobbs.
Now, were things said? Yeah, we have vendors, we have former state employees in high levels saying that promises were made or suggestions were made about keeping a director on. It all looks unseemly, but the bottom line is there has been no direct line pointed to the governor as of yet.
And Mark, this has kind of turned out to be about the only big issue that it seems that this gubernatorial race is discussing beyond Katie Hobbs’ commercials, which no one can turn on a TV without seeing them.
MARK BRODIE: Well, so, Tony, if this is such a big issue in the gubernatorial race, I would imagine that if you’re the Hobbs campaign, you don’t love that.
TONY CANI: Well, obviously they don’t want this to be the big issue. I don’t know if this is the big issue in the gubernatorial race. I think that what’s happening is the Republicans and the legislators on the Republican side want this to become the big issue. And so, this is a thing that the governor is having to answer questions about. She’s been asked about it for a long time.
But what you’re seeing is that the Republicans are scrambling because they are losing in races that, mathematically, you would think they should be winning because of the voter registration advantage. And a lot of that’s due to the past votes of Andy Biggs, how extremely far to the right he is. And so what you’re seeing here is an attempt to change the conversation, and that’s what’s going on.
And I think it is interesting that they want these documents released before their own investigations are completed. I think that’s an important thing to think about. If they had stuff that they wanted to put out there, why don’t they just release what their sort of allegations are in a way? But instead, that’s the thing that points to this being political theater to me. That part doesn’t make any sense to me.
MARK BRODIE: Well, we should point out that the attorney general has said that she does plan to release the files after they go through a legal review that they’re doing. At some point, they’ll release that.
But I guess, Doug, you mentioned that there are more allegations. There are people saying promises were made or offers were allegedly made, but there isn’t a direct line to the governor.
Like, does that matter? To the extent that this is sort of in the public conversation in an election, does it matter that there isn’t a direct line to the governor, or could it potentially be damaging just to have her name and this situation in the same sentence?
DOUG COLE: Well, first of all, what really matters, is there a direct line to the governor? And that has not surfaced yet. A lot of conversations have been revealed, a lot of them a little unseemly, but they have not made a direct line to the governor or her chief of staff. It’s been a vendor saying something to a then-agency director that was being carried over from the Ducey administration.
Remember, this was in the opening days of the Hobbs administration. This investigation and these discussions have been going on for her whole term now. So at the end of the day, unless there’s a direct line to the governor, this is just a bunch of noise because the campaign we see in polling is about water security, is about the economy, cost of gas, groceries, the affordability factor. Those are what voters are really caring about — pocketbook issues.
But if I was running the Republican side of this campaign, I’d be doing the same thing because you take every issue during an active election season and you try to make your points off of it. And that’s what they’re doing. Will it resonate with voters? I don’t think so at the end of the day unless they can directly connect a line with Governor Hobbs.
TONY CANI: Part of it, too, is I think that what was being asked for was a matching of the amount of money that the federal government was going to be paying this same group home — the room provider, the group homes — so that the state would be able to keep beds for people in need.
And so this isn’t, I think that’s one thing to keep in mind, is that they’re kind of being very careful about what they’re saying because I think they want the public to think that this was some very dirty, messy thing when really it was about, “All right, look, the federal government’s going to pay me this much. If you want to keep these beds, you’re going to need to increase the pay.” And then the ultimate decision that was made was to do that.
And so I do think that that is going to have an impact, too, is that when you start to explain it, they’re like, “Oh, that’s what was going on? All right.”
DOUG COLE: And these are beds for foster kids, too. These weren’t sober living homes or things like these. These were for foster kids. And that’s what the case is. So again, unless there’s a direct connection, it’s pretty much a bunch of noise because voters are really caring about pocketbook issues right now.
MARK BRODIE: OK. So, Doug, does that mean to suggest that voters are not necessarily thinking about how many justices are on the U.S. Supreme Court? Because talking about the governor’s race, Andy Biggs this week was in D.C. with Congress — was in session this week — he was there pushing a proposal to constitutionally limit the number of Supreme Court justices to the number that we have now.
DOUG COLE: First of all, Mark, that was a wonderful segue. That was fantastic. You’ve been doing this a while.
MARK BRODIE: Thank you. It just came to me, I promise.
DOUG COLE: Yeah. So we saw, interestingly, well, you’ve got to realize that Congressman Biggs is still a congressman. He has a day job, and he was back in Congress yesterday and this week working on a bill that he supports and has been a key backer of that would be a constitutional amendment that would limit the amount of Supreme Court justices to nine, which is what it has been since, fun fact, 1869.
There have been other attempts in the past, most recently — not recently —
MARK BRODIE: FDR.
DOUG COLE: FDR in 1937, he was trying to get his New Deal through, and the court in those days was very conservative. So he had a plan that he was trying to get through Congress to expand the court. Now Congress enjoys, constitutionally, full authority about how many justices are on the Supreme Court. So this has been talked about over time.
This was going to put a limit to it. It didn’t pass. It needed two-thirds. It didn’t even come close. It came close to passing on just a pure up or down vote, but it needs two-thirds.
But interestingly, we find Congressman Biggs in Washington making this argument when he is 30 days out from early ballots being mailed out. So that’s a challenge, being a sitting congressman, trying to have a foot in both camps here.
So I think that how courts are maintained and influenced has a lot of history, especially here in Arizona. As you know, Governor Ducey expanded our court — the state Supreme Court — just a few years ago, and there were a lot of the same issues being argued at that time, but flipped on the other side. And I think Congressman Biggs also supported that expansion of the Arizona Supreme Court.
MARK BRODIE: Yeah, he was Senate president. Well, so, Tony, I mean, obviously, if you’re a member of Congress and Congress is in session, you should probably be in D.C. doing your job. So not necessarily throwing shade on Congressman Biggs for doing that.
I wonder, though, is there an argument to be made that if you’re going to be doing that, maybe this is not the issue to be front and center on while you’re doing that, given the calendar?
TONY CANI: I think it shows — it’s just another indication of the types of priorities that Biggs has taken on while he was in Congress. And so he really has very little to point to from an accomplishment perspective, the things that he did in Congress, which is why he’s not campaigning on anything like that.
It seems to me that a part of this is it’s just like a bunch of jumping up and down and waving your arms saying, “President Trump, please spend money in my race,” because the type of outside investment I think that the Biggs campaign had hoped would come in is not coming in. And so, once again, it’s just another effort to try and curry favor with the president to say, “Can you please help bail me out? We’re losing here.”
And so, you would want him to be in the state campaigning, talking to local media, talking to local voters, but —
MARK BRODIE: Which he will be now, because Congress has recessed for a little while again. So he’ll be back and doing the stuff that candidates typically do.
DOUG COLE: But to Tony’s point, Mark, it’s Sept. 4. It’s go time. It’s go time. Ballots are being prepared to be mailed out. Eighty-plus percent of Arizonans vote by mail. Four or five years ago, I think it was closer to 90%.
So it’s go time. And a campaign, especially a top-of-the-ticket statewide campaign, we should be seeing a lot of commercials. We should see a lot of big social media presence by the Biggs campaign, and it’s just not there. So it begs the question, is the cavalry coming?
MARK BRODIE: Hmm, interesting. All right. Tony, let me start with you on the secretary of state debate this week. They were on PBS: Alexander Kolodin, the Republican, Adrian Fontes, the Democrat. This was, maybe not surprisingly, kind of a feisty gathering. Would you say that’s an accurate sentiment?
TONY CANI: Oh, yeah. It was probably as feisty as PBS can get.
MARK BRODIE: Come on, you can’t throw shade on my fellow public media brethren here.
TONY CANI: I’m not throwing shade at all, I think it’s great. It was contentious, and it came down to sort of the core questions of which candidate do you trust to not try and put a thumb on the scales of our elections to influence them one way or another?
And Kolodin is the Republican who was the key lawyer in many of the challenges to try and stop the transition of power in 2021 from Trump to Biden. He had a hard time answering questions about where he stands. And the general sort of feeling that Andy Biggs, who has a similar problem, and Kolodin have, they’re like, “Can we please talk about something else, please? I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Let’s move on.”
But the problem is, past decisions of individual candidates go to their judgment. And I think that that’s like fair game. I think people are really annoyed about it, they don’t want to talk about the 2020 election anymore, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a core of voters who are like, “Why are you — that just shows that you don’t have good judgment.”
And so that was I think why it focused so much, and Kolodin really struggled to get out of that. Ted didn’t seem to have to ask him the question like three, four times and end up saying, “All right, I guess you’re just not going to answer the question.”
And so it was an interesting debate. I don’t know how many people would see it, but feisty.
DOUG COLE: Well, he finally admitted that Joe Biden did win the presidency, finally. I think that was one of the first admissions to that. But Tony’s correct, they tried to — I think Secretary Fontes was very good in bringing back all the facts of what happened. Alexander Kolodin was one of the head lawyers with the famous Kraken lawsuits, and he was sanctioned by the Arizona Supreme Court for his role in that. And that’s a big deal if you have a law license.
And I think Kolodin was able to bring out that Secretary Fontes went ahead and printed a bunch of ballots during the 2020 election and was going to mail them out to everybody, which was eventually stopped by the courts, brought that issue out.
So there were good things that went back and forth, but at the end of the day, it was kind of a lot of revisionist history by the Republican candidate saying, “I think the key point here is people don’t trust elections.” Well, why don’t they trust elections? It’s because a lot of the actions that he actually was front and center and involved with has brought some distrust to the elections.
Remember, we’ve talked about this many times on this show: Early voting started in Arizona in 1991, 1992, and it has benefited Republicans time and time again. Right, Tony?
TONY CANI: Yeah, for sure.
DOUG COLE: Yeah, so I don’t understand this debate here in the state of Arizona. We do it well. We’re the Cadillac of processes here. Sure, there’s problems. Problems pop up here and there, but the fact of the matter is, as I mentioned earlier, recent elections have come close to 90% of Arizonans using early voting.
MARK BRODIE: Lots of Arizonans vote by mail.
DOUG COLE: Correct. Correct. And so I just don’t understand why Republicans would even be talking about trying to stymie it or get rid of early voting here in the state of Arizona.
TONY CANI: And that goes to the question of motivation. That goes to the question of integrity. And the reason is because Donald Trump has a problem with them, and it’s a way that he can point to something to explain why he lost that election.
And I think that is a really core issue here, especially when the president is more unpopular than he has ever been in the polling in Arizona. And that is: What is Kolodin willing to do to keep President Trump happy? And I think that he’s in a bad position. He’s not going to be able to answer that in a way that voters are going to like.
MARK BRODIE: So, Tony, we talked about some of the issues that voters maybe care about when they’re going to the polls. One of them seemingly right now is data centers, and a lot of voters don’t like them. They don’t want them in their neighborhoods.
The attorney general this week called for basically a moratorium on new data center construction in Arizona. The governor wasn’t willing to go quite that far. She said, “We put a pause on the tax incentive for them. That should be good enough. But there’s some places where data centers maybe are appropriate.”
How big of an issue do you expect this to be in Arizona specifically? We’ve seen it elsewhere. It’s becoming seemingly a really big issue. Do you think it’s going to be here?
TONY CANI: Yeah, I think it’s a really big issue. A supermajority of Arizonans and Americans are very reluctant to sort of want a data center in their neighborhood, or even to be put in. You can have an argument about the merits of that or why, but a lot of this comes down to the sort of central feeling that a lot of voters have today that the system is rigged against them for the ultra-wealthy. And one of the big people that you can point to, a group of people, are these very wealthy tech executives.
MARK BRODIE: So this is sort of a proxy for some of the bigger arguments then?
TONY CANI: So it’s a proxy for some of these bigger issues. And so a lot of the pushback saying, “Hey, but we need them. It’s important for tax revenue” or whatever, I’m not sure that’s actually getting to the central reason why people are objecting to this.
And it is an issue that will not go away. I think that for years this has been percolating, and many of these tech executives and the people who sort of represented them have been warned, “Hey, public sentiment is really turning against you.”
But a level of arrogance — you can tell that I’m not like a lobbyist — a level of arrogance and sort of elitism and sort of a sense of entitlement has had them not just wanting to get these things in the ground, but to want tax incentives and all kinds of, frankly, giveaways.
And now they’re scrambling to be like, “Here is why these are actually important.” And I don’t think that they’re going to be able to communicate that to voters before the election.
MARK BRODIE: Doug, is this going to be a big issue here, do you think?
DOUG COLE: Well, first of all, Tony, as a lobbyist, I don’t take any offense to those comments.
But, yeah, I mean, look, we were begging data centers back in the Brewer administration and the early Ducey administration. The tax incentives started back when Jan Brewer, in her last two years in office, Legislature passed it and we have it because we wanted this investment. That was before we got the hyper-scale data centers that we have now. They just didn’t exist.
TONY CANI: The AI data centers have really changed this conversation.
DOUG COLE: Yeah, so your dad’s data centers are not your son’s data centers, OK?
TONY CANI: Like, you have that data center that people are pointing to in Louisiana where the windfall from the construction taxes led to something like $40,000 bonuses for all the teachers. But the part that people aren’t talking about is they had to build 10 gas power plants in order for that thing to go up. That is not the kind of data center that we’re used to here.
DOUG COLE: OK, so fast forward, head down to Pima County and you’ve got Project Blue. I think that was probably the biggest first flashpoint last year. And that was a data center that was going to be down towards Vail on county land, and had a deal with the city of Tucson. And that thing just melted down, OK? It was a nuclear reactor core melting down.
It was unbelievable. You saw the far right joining hands with the far left, and for once agreeing on an issue. Maybe different, they just didn’t want it, but for different reasons. And then it moved to Marana. And now we have a pretty hot case down here in Ahwatukee with the Menlo Park that’s right on 48th Street across from 20 homes in an old 40-acre office call center park. And it’s going vertical. Steel girders are up.
In fact, the attorney general that you mentioned, she’s going to have a town hall on it next month on that project, but that project’s moving out of the ground. Here’s where it gets really tricky in Arizona: We have something called Prop 207, and the voters passed that in the last 20 years. What that says is you can’t do a taking, so government can’t change a zoning. So if you have the zoning — which is an entitlement, that brings value to the property. So if government would happen to go back in and change that zoning, such in the Menlo Park case back here — by the way, that zoning was put in in 1996 at that Menlo Park.
MARK BRODIE: It’s been a while.
DOUG COLE: It’s been a while. So the city of Phoenix would be on the hook. The taxpayers of the city of Phoenix, the residents of the city of Phoenix, would have to, if the city would happen to shut it down, they would owe the owners of Menlo Park tens of millions of dollars because that’s in the Constitution. So that plays into this. Yeah, it’s a flashpoint, and it is a proxy. It is a proxy for so many other issues that we could probably do a whole show on.
MARK BRODIE: Yeah, that is really interesting. All right, guys, we’re going to have to leave it there. Doug Cole, Tony Cani, thanks to both of you for the conversation. I really appreciate it.
DOUG COLE: Thank you.
MARK BRODIE: You’ve been listening to the Friday NewsCap from KJZZ’s The Show. It’s an original podcast recapping the week's biggest stories with experts, commentators and reporters. You can get the full Show podcast at podcast.kjzz.org. I'm Mark Brodie, thanks for listening.
