Journalists’ Roundtable: Senator Eva Burch resigns and more

It’s Friday, which means it is time for another edition of Journalists’ Roundtable. This week, “Arizona Horizon” was hosted by Steve Goldstein who was joined by Jeremy Duda of Axios Phoenix, Mark Brodie of KJZZ and Camryn Sanchez of KJZZ.

This week’s topic:

• Eva Burch resigns from the legislature
• Prop 139 preempts 15-week abortion limit
• Prop 123 progress
• Marlene Galan-Woods running for Congress again in CD-1
• Bill to ban protest encampments passes the House
• Kris Mayes and other AGs hold public event in Phoenix
• Trump’s address to Congress
• Timothy Courchaine new acting U.S. Attorney for Arizona

Eva Burch Resigns

Jeremy Duda: “Maybe if she wants a higher paying one, you know, if she were going to run for something, obviously pretty much any public office in the state probably pays more than the $24,000 a year that the state legislators get paid. I think she’s very much right in terms of this is a complaint you hear if you’re on the Capitol all the time is that these folks just do not get paid a heck of a lot.”

Mark Brodie: “This often goes to voters, and voters routinely shoot it down, usually by not particularly close margins. It seems like it would be kind of a tough sell. I just talked to some folks this week. It seems like it would, especially right now, it would be a very tough sell to ask voters, hey, do you think that we should give legislators more pay, especially when, you know, a lot of folks are still kind of struggling financially? Should we raise… Even though, as you point out, it’s been this way for a long time now.”

Prop 123 progress

Camryn Sanchez: “This is something that everyone agrees on in one sense of the word, which is that everyone agrees that we need to continue it, have something permanent hopefully, and use a lot of it, or most of it, or all of it, for teacher pay increases. So that’s the good news, and we’ve been in agreement on that part for, I guess, years now. The part where everyone disagrees is in the details. As we’ve said, you know, in the past, Hobbs has a different proposal than the Republican lawmakers do, even though she seems to have compromised the most so far, coming down on that.”

Jeremy Duda: “Put this on the ballot, the Ducey administration kind of brokered the deal, And so it was a much different circumstance 10 years ago now they’re looking to redirect for the funding, because this was just going to get education funding in general.”