Journalists’ Roundtable: Governor releases budget, first week of legislative session and more

It’s Friday, which means it is time for another edition of Journalists’ Roundtable, where we discuss Arizona politics. This week, “Arizona Horizon” host Ted Simons was joined by Jeremy Duda of AXIOS Phoenix, Dennis Welch of CBS 5 and 3TV and Jim Small of the Arizona Mirror.

This week’s topics included:

• Governor Hobbs’ new budget
• First week of legislative session
• Mark Brnovich
• Senator Kelly sues Pete Hegseth
• Former Senator Kyrsten Sinema sued

Governor Hobbs’ new budget

Jeremy Duda: “Affordability is the big word of the session for her. Trying to help folks who are struggling with rising costs of pretty much everything these days, the ways she’s trying to fund a lot of this is kind of interesting. There are a lot of negotiations to come.”

Dennis Welch: “It’s certainly not gonna come in a timely manner because part of this whole thing wrapped up into this budget is they’ve got this tax fight right now that they’re trying to get done, and they’re trying to get it down right now as Arizonans are filing their taxes, so there’s a time component on this.”

First week of the legislative session

Jim Small: “Fastest bill passed, and swiftly vetoed this year because of the one big beautiful bill act, tax cuts and spending cuts in DC, a lot of tax cuts, a lot of changes to tax law, states have to now incorporate those and think how they’re gonna do it; that’s what this fight is about. Republicans just want to wholesale adopt everything that was in that. The Governor’s office wants to adopt most of it; they passed this bill and sent it up to the Governor, and the Governor vetoed it; she alluded to it, said ‘I want this done, but I want it done the way that I want it.'”

Welch: “They don’t want to negotiate these kinds of things in the public. He (Montenegro) didn’t seem to be interested, or too stressed about working with the Governor to negotiate away anything into their tax package.”