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The Prickly brief: These issues will likely dominate debate in the Arizona Legislature in 2025

https://kjzz.org/podcast/prickly
Sky Schaudt/KJZZ

Welcome to the seventh episode of Prickly, a podcast from KJZZ’s Politics Desk. Subscribe here or wherever you get your podcasts, and don’t forget to subscribe to the Prickly newsletter.

A new year means a new legislative session for Arizona lawmakers returning to the Capitol in Phoenix. Political editor Ben Giles catches up with field correspondents Camryn Sanchez and Wayne Schutsky for a debrief on the topics and issues — some prickly — that will likely dominate debate this year.

  • Another Maricopa County sales tax is set to expire, unless state lawmakers agree to refer a measure to county voters to renew it.
  • Lawmakers must act quickly to refer Proposition 123, a measure that draws dollars from the state land trust to boost funding for education, back to voters statewide. If the Democratic governor and Republican leaders can't find a compromise, K-12 schools will lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding.
  • Republicans have plans to alter how votes are cast, part of an effort to speed up the process of determining winners and losers on election night. But Democrats warn they'll oppose any measure that adds new limits on when and how voters vote.
More Prickly podcast episodes

Ben Giles is a senior editor at KJZZ.
Camryn Sanchez is a field correspondent at KJZZ covering everything to do with state politics.
Wayne Schutsky is a broadcast field correspondent covering Arizona politics on KJZZ. He has over a decade of experience as a journalist reporting on local communities in Arizona and the state Capitol.