KJZZ’s Friday NewsCap revisits some of the biggest stories of the week from Arizona and beyond.
Chuck Coughlin of HighGround and Stacy Pearson of Lumen Strategies joined The Show this week to talk about budget battles as the fiscal year draws to a close, a new record for gubernatorial vetoes and more.
Conversation highlights
MARK BRODIE: Stacy, let me ask you about the new, this is, I don't know if this is a record that Gov. [Katie] Hobbs wants to set, but a new she broke her own record for the number of vetoes.
STACY PEARSON: She did.
BRODIE: The caveat here is that there were two budgets which each contained what, like 14 or 15 bills.
PEARSON: Well over a dozen.
BRODIE: So you get a big, a big chunk just in, in that, and she vetoed two of them, but you know. The, her first year, she had a lot of vetoes. Second year, fewer, this year the most. I mean, is there anything to take away from that?
PEARSON: So we're going to see some of the vetoes come back as zombie referrals. I expect to have a big long ballot again.
BRODIE: Ballot referrals.
PEARSON: Yeah, there's, I don't know, seven, 10 that have already been filed as referrals. So the voters are gonna make decisions on some of this, but some of the bills that she vetoed were objectively terrible, like re-legalizing silencers, “making silencers great again.”
You know what's, you know, you know what's worse than a mass shooting? Not hearing one start. I mean, this is, this is terrible. Like of course she should veto silencers. It, there was a bill that didn't allow for cities to reduce public safety funding. Public safety was against that. I mean there we've been through a recession. We understand how budgets work. The Arizona Police Association asked her to veto that. I mean, we're talking about some really strange things that the Legislature popped up to her.
BRODIE: Yeah, Chuck, what do you, I mean, you've, as we've talked, you've worked with a couple of governors. They, they don't, they don't have this record.
CHUCK COUGHLIN: No, but this, this Legislature's got a track record of sending HCRs, of stuff that goes to the ballot.
BRODIE: Ballot referrals.
COUGHLIN: Right, and she's 100% right. I think they believe that helped them last time. They had a bunch of stuff on the ballot. That, you know, they could narrate and they could sell to their base and that they believed that helped them. So one of those was defeated last night in the House. They tried to put up a, a photo radar ban, for the ballot, and, it did not muster the 31 votes necessary to get over the finish line.
But at the end of the day, the bigger story here is, you know, it really comes down to the governor. I mean, so she's going to campaign, that's gonna be her message. These people are crazy. You know, I'm gonna, I'm your, I'm your backstop. I'm, I'm your hero.
Is that enough? Is that enough in the age of Trump to say, is that enough to convince voters to say, hey, I'm going that way because I'm scared. To that, or does somehow the Republican primary end up generating some ideas about how we move forward that she will have to react to? I think that's the really big question going forward.
You know, you have big water issues in the state, we have public education funding issues going on in the state, as we always do. We have mental health funding issues going forward in the state, as we always do, you have, you know, local autonomy on zoning and housing going forward on, on what we need as a state.
There's a lot of stuff that, you know, it's not a good enough answer to just say, well, I veto it, you know, you got to lead at some point. Somebody's got to figure out how to lead down there.
BRODIE: Are you suggesting a campaign might be about policy?
COUGHLIN: Oh, maybe that's why, that's why I'm now 63 and maybe why I don't do this anymore.
PEARSON: Aw, Chuck's getting soft. [LAUGHS]
BRODIE: Stacy, let me start with you on what has been known as the Diamondbacks bill, after a lot of negotiation, a lot of delay, this bill is headed to the governor. The conventional wisdom is that she will sign it.
It's a way for the D-backs to, basically the bill will divert some money, some tax revenue to a district, the stadium district, to help the Diamondbacks refurbish Chase Field. Is this, this seems like one of those, again, we talked about the budget, has bipartisan support and bipartisan opposition, but this is one that it seemed like the governor was fairly engaged on it and really trying to come up with some kind of deal on.
PEARSON: For sure, and in full disclosure, my business partner was one of the lead lobbyists on this, and my former business partner really likes baseball, so that, that might have something to do with it, but the truth is we can't rewind, the how the stadium was built to begin with. The taxpayers own it. There's no time machine, we can't go 30 years ago and decide we didn't want to own it. The taxpayers don't want to own it.
And now we have an albatross with no air conditioning at the corner of Main and Main getting into downtown Phoenix, and taxpayers needed to fix it, and regardless of whether or not you care about baseball or think that public financing should even be on the table. If the baseball team moved away, we'd have to tear it down. There's still an expense.
This still was a building that taxpayers owned, so you had to decide whether or not you want baseball to be played in it or you want to take it down.
BRODIE: Well, Chuck, that was an argument that a lot of supporters of this bill said you heard over and over, this is a building that the public owns, so we should, we should take care of it.
COUGHLIN: Yeah, hats off to Jeff Weninger, who had the courage to sponsor the bill in the House, yeah, you know, he sponsored it based on that thematic, and I got it. I mean, I was around when Mary Rose got shot, when Jim Bruner lost his campaign for Congress because he supported the baseball stadium, but the basic fact is Stacy's right.
This was a taxpayer built building and we'd walked away from the maintenance of the facility and the obligation to sustain that $250 million back in the day, probably a half a billion dollars today or more, and so we have an investment.
So what do you do with the investment? I mean, that, that's a, that's a brass tax question. I was happy to see Mr. Weninger support it. I was delighted to see the veteran legislator JD Mesnard dig in, because I think he's probably the only person in the Capitol that would have been capable of getting that deal done.
BRODIE: Is this a tough one optically because of what the building is? It's a baseball stadium run by, you know, one of the richest owners in baseball.
PEARSON: Politically active, Republican.
COUGHLIN: Wife is.
BRODIE: And you have and you have players playing there who all make millions, you know, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars as a taxpayer. It seems like it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say, why don't they pay for it? Why am i paying for it?
COUGHLIN: It's just not happening in anywhere in Major League Major league sports today. Vegas is building a brand new stadium with public money. It's a luxury
PEARSON: Utah has.
COUGHLIN: Yeah, it's a luxury that, that if you want as a community, which means that you're now part of the elite communities in, in the country, if you want this, then you got to figure out how to host them. And as you said, most of those players are making hundreds of millions of dollars.
Now you, now they, their, their income tax dollars are gonna go to the stadium. So you can make that argument that it's a self-contained economic enterprise, which generates additional economic enterprise around it.
