Journalists’ Roundtable: Arizona politics, Congress bids and more

It’s Friday, which means it is time for another edition of Journalists’ Roundtable. This week, “Arizona Horizon” host Ted Simons was joined by Jeremy Duda of Axios Phoenix, Camryn Sanchez of KJZZ and Dennis Welch of CBS-5 and 3-TV.

This week’s topics:

• Fontes interested in succeeding Grijalva
• DCS congregate care funding
• Lake accosts Gallego
• State conducts execution
• Kate Gallego vs. Chase Field revenue bill

Could Adrian Fontes be running for Congress?

Jeremy Duda: “Well, a few days ago, he put that statement from his own Twitter that says, “I am officially considering this.” He put out an email to his staff, and I think for most people, that’s pretty definitive.”

Would this make him a front-runner?

Camryn Sanchez: “I would say a front-runner but not necessarily the front-runner, I think, I don’t want to discount some of the other names that have been tossed out there like Grijalva, Adalita Grijalva. Obviously, she has the name of recognition of being the Congressman’s daughter, and she’s on the board of supervisors, and she’s in the community all the time.”

Lake accosts Gallego

Dennis Welch: “It kind of shows. Has she gotten over this loss? It feels like she’s still really stung by this.”

Duda: “She’s still out there. She still has a war-room Twitter account even though she is not a candidate anymore. She’s very much out there as a partisan-political figure.”

Sanchez: “I don’t really understand what her job is anymore because initially she was supposed to be leading the voice of America, and then that kind of got destroyed. But then she was appointed to lead this oversight agency. But then I’m not sure what else they oversee now.”

Funding fights

Duda: “There’s, I think, $112 million shortfall at the Department of Economic Security for this developmental disabilities program; legislature accuses the Governor of continuing to run a federally funded program that no longer has federal funding, and so you end with a hole in the budget.”

The state conducts an execution

Sanchez: “The method of which we do this, because in the past we’ve had a lot of botched executions that took a really long time, the person appeared to be in pain which was obviously terrible. Nobody wanted that. There were some issues with pre-curing the drugs that we need to do because we do lethal injections.”

Kate Gallego vs. Chase Field revenue bill

Welch: “The Mayor had put a letter out this past week expressing some real serious concerns about this, and number one about this is they would like to see a cap on the amount of money that can go back into this fund to pay for maintenance and upgrades to this stadium.”

Welch: “I also know another big concern about this bill that’s in the legislature is the penalty if the Diamondbacks leave early, if they leave before 2035 is only $10 million that they have to pay, a lot of people are looking at that saying, ‘That’s chicken feed for organizations this large.'”