Journalists’ Roundtable: Governor Hobbs issues bill-signing moratorium and more

April 17

It’s Friday, which means it’s time for another edition of Journalists’ Roundtable, where we discuss Arizona politics. This week, “Arizona Horizon” host Ted Simons was joined by Howie Fischer and Mary Jo Pitzl, both of Capitol Media Services, and Jeremy Duda of Axios Phoenix.

This week’s topics included:

Bill-signing moratorium
Schweikert’s absence at TPA event
Judge rules Lytle stays on ballot
Gallego-Swalwell relationship
Kelly raises $13M after “illegal orders” video
SLAPP law survives court challenge

Bill-signing moratorium:

Howie Fischer: “She wants to see their budget. Her argument is, look, second week in January, you got my budget. I have a…17.8 billion dollar spending plan, and here’s how I want to pay for it…what do you have in mind? Well, we’re not going to tell you exactly, but we don’t want this, we don’t want this…and she finally walked out and said i’ve had enough.”

Mary Jo Pitzl: “…there’s a lot of reasons to try to get that done earlier, like an election that’s happening, you know, on July 21st. But right now, the Republicans are working on their own plan.”

Jeremy Duda: “…when she announced that she was, you know, pulling out ofthis budget talks Prop. 123 was really front and center in terms of the reasons because the Republicans say we don’t actually need the governor to do this, and the governor said, well, I want to be part of that…it actually doesn’t seem like that big an ask in terms of these billboards…just show us the budget, and then they’ll fight for two more months about an actual deal.”

Howie Fischer: “The problem with 123 is, as you know, back in 2016, voters approved this measure, and it takes additional money out of the state land trust for Education, and that provided about…330 million dollars a year extra for K-12 education…the governor’s position is okay if we go ahead and renew one, two, three for some period of time, we free up that money for some of the other priorities that she has.”