The post Arizona Capitol Times – September 11, 2026 first appeared on Arizona Capitol Times.

PHOENIX — The state Court of Appeals has rejected efforts to void a 2024 voter-approved immigration measure.

In a new ruling Thursday, the judges upheld Proposition 314, which allows police to arrest those who cross the border at other than a port of entry and charge them with committing a state crime.

In 2025, Living United for Change in Arizona sued, charging that the law has provisions that violate federal and state constitutional protections, ranging from possible discriminatory enforcement to whether the measure failed to provide for a new source of revenues for enforcement.

But Judge David Weinzweig, writing for the unanimous three-judge panel, said that, in the end, all that is irrelevant. He said that the challenge fails if for no other reason than LUCHA lacks standing to sue in the first place.

The ruling drew an angry reaction from Alejandra Gomez, the executive director of the community organizing group.

“We are appalled that the Court of Appeals has allowed Proposition 314 to stand at a moment when immigrant communities are already being terrorized by an increasingly aggressive federal immigration enforcement apparatus,” she said.

Gomez said no decision has been made whether to seek Arizona Supreme Court review.

Prop. 314 is crafted in a way designed not so much to incarcerate the border crossers but instead convince them to agree to be deported. That, in turn, means all charges against them would be dropped.

LUCHA argued that the provision is worded in a way that it is more likely to affect its members who share the “race, ethnicity or national origin of the immigrants who enter Arizona from the southern border” and they are more “vulnerable to misapplication” than the public at large.

Weinzweig, however, said the possibility that the law may be misapplied in the future — and to someone who shares the same ethnic background as LUCHA members — doesn’t allow them to try to ask courts to halt enforcement of the law.

“Declaratory relief should be based on an existing set of facts, not those which may or may not arise in the future,” he wrote.

That conclusion parallels a similar ruling in July by U.S. District Court Judge Michael Liburdi. He tossed a challenge to Prop. 314 brought by the Florence Immigrant Rights and Refugee Project noting that the organization had failed to show anyone had actually been affected by the new law.

In Thursday’s state appellate court ruling, Weinzweig also rejected the claim that the standards that allow police to arrest border crossers ignore constitutional requirements.

The law provides three options: the officer’s own observation, a recording, or “any other constitutionally sufficient indicia of probable cause.” While that last provision is not defined in Prop. 314, Weinzweig said those are the same standards already required for arrest under the Fourth Amendment, which protects against illegal search and seizure.

LUCHA fared no better with a parallel attack on how Prop. 314 would be funded.

The challengers pointed out that the Arizona Constitution says any ballot measure that proposes the mandatory spending of state revenues must also provide a new source for those dollars.

Put another way, a ballot measure is invalid if it simply says that any required costs will be picked up from already existing taxes or other sources. And it applies regardless of whether the proposal was referred to voters by lawmakers themselves — as is the case here — or was put on the ballot through an initiative petition of Arizona voters.

In this case, the challengers noted, Prop. 314 requires the state Department of Corrections to transport those who agree to leave the country to the border. And that, the challengers said, is an obligation to spend state resources without a commensurate increase in new dollars.

Weinzweig wasn’t buying it.

He said the measure is crafted so the mandatory obligation to transport people to the border actually falls on local law enforcement agencies whose anticipated new expenses are not covered by the state constitutional requirement. Weinzweig said the only time costs are borne by the state is if the local agency does not have the capacity to hold someone.

“This is a contingency, not a mandate,” the judge wrote.

Gomez, in her statement, said the ruling comes as the Trump administration “continues expanding the reach of immigration enforcement into more parts of everyday life.”

“Proposition 314 threatens to pour gasoline on that fire,” she said.

“It gives Arizona another vehicle to target immigrant communities, drag state and local institutions deeper into immigration enforcement, and force taxpayers to bankroll a reckless law with no clear way to pay for it,” Gomez said.

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The post Kirk’s influence reshaped Arizona Republicans. It’s still being felt first appeared on Arizona Capitol Times.

One year ago this week, a rifleman ended Charlie Kirk’s life under a tent at Utah Valley University and meant, by that single shot, to end his argument with it. The country has had these twelve months to decide whether the proper memorial is only a wreath or a reckoning. 

I write as a Baptist minister formed in the Black pulpit and in the civil rights tradition. I supported President Donald J. Trump because he treated Black prosperity as an achievement to be won, not a grievance to be leased. Charlie Kirk spoke that same language. 

On this anniversary, his meaning to Black Americans is not a sentiment. It is a summons that outlived him. He told the young they were not condemned by history and not excused by it. The opposite sentence is that skin is destiny, and destiny is the state’s to administer. Kirk named that doctrine what it is: the soft bigotry of low expectations. He insisted that “all communities will do even better when we stop living under” it. 

The year since his death has been loud with eulogy. He was offering a sequence older than any platform. “Three things that will almost assuredly keep you out of poverty,” he wrote: get a job, graduate high school, and do not have children before marriage. 

Brookings and the Institute for Family Studies measured the same path and called it the success sequence. Among millennials who finished high school, worked full time, and married before bearing children, 97% were not poor in their early thirties. Among Black millennials who kept that order, 96% were not poor. Half of those who kept none of the three steps were poor. The numbers do not flatter ideology. They honor conduct.

Look at the ledger of the last sixty years. In 1959 the official poverty rate among Black Americans stood near 55%, yet more than three quarters of Black children were born to married parents, and two thirds lived in two-parent homes. 

By 2023, the poverty rate had fallen to roughly 18%, a gain no honest man will despise, yet 69.3% of Black births were to unmarried mothers, and only about 45% of Black children lived with two parents. The Heritage Foundation set the figures side by side: as legal racism receded, the family fractured. 

“When Lyndon Baines Johnson came in through the Great Society program and started to subsidize single motherhood, it hurt all communities,” Kirk said. “We should be doing the opposite. We should be instead subsidizing nuclear families and families that are staying together and that are loyally married.” Kirk refused the claim that this collapse is “systemic” in the fashionable sense: a hidden machinery of white malice still grinding after the statutes were repealed. He asked what law now on the books actively discriminates against Black people, then named the laws that pay for a father’s absence and call the payment justice. 

He did not deny the American crime of slavery or the long insult of Jim Crow. He denied that a nation which elected a Black president twice and spent trillions in the name of uplift is still best understood as a plantation with better manners.

Faith was not an ornament on Kirk’s politics. It was the load-bearing wall. “There is a God,” his friends remembered him saying, “and it is not us.” He told men to love their wives and lead their homes as men worth following. The Black church has known that grammar for generations. I have preached it over open graves and at kitchen tables. It is why his campus tours and the BLEXIT partnership through Turning Point USA found an audience among young Black conservatives tired of piety being treated as a lullaby for the oppressed. 

At Kirk’s memorial, President Trump said what the record already showed: “Charlie was actually a master builder of people. It was Charlie who first started organizing young Black conservatives hungry for support and leadership.” 

Between 2020 and 2024, the Black share of the Trump vote rose, and among Black men it rose further still. Kirk helped build that turn. I worked in that same vineyard. I had given speeches with him in support of candidates, standing in the same heat and the same hope. 

I think now of the joy and the fellowship of that last Arizona afternoon at the Arizona Biltmore, the ballroom loud for Andy Biggs in his race for governor and for Warren Petersen in his race for attorney general, the room full of neighbors who still believed a state could be ordered toward family and work. We laughed. We prayed. We left certain the afternoon was ordinary. In hindsight, it was not. 

Kirk moved through that hall, and later through those last public hours under the Utah tent, with a composure that, looking back, carries the same grace Martin Luther King Jr. showed on the eve of his death in Memphis, when he said he had been to the mountaintop and was not afraid. It is surreal to write that sentence. 

A year later, I can still hear that afternoon at the Biltmore, and I can still see that he had already given the speech away to the people who would have to finish it. One may dispute the party. One cannot dispute the hunger for a word other than grievance.

What, then, does Kirk mean on this first anniversary of his assassination? He means that love does not flatter a people. Love tells the truth about the home, because the home is where a people is made or unmade. He means that the first civil right is the right to be expected to be good. A boy in Phoenix or Baltimore is not a metaphor in a seminar. He is a soul. Souls are not funded. They are formed.

The unfinished work of this anniversary is not another bureau and not another statue. It is the recovery of the household, the school that teaches letters instead of racial liturgy, and the pulpit that still dares to say that God is God and that a man who begets a child owes that child his name. 

Kirk did not invent that creed. He had the nerve to speak it in rooms taught to call it hate. President Trump honored the man who organized the hungry. If Black America takes him at his word in this twelfth month, it will not be because a white activist conferred permission. It will be because the data, the churches and the memory of better order already knew he was right, and because a people tired of being pitied has decided, at last, to be free.

The Rev. Jarrett Barton Maupin, Jr., is a Baptist minister, civil rights leader, public intellectual, and political commentator and consultant from Phoenix. Find or follow him on X: @ReverendMaupin.

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The post Heap skips back-to-back Corporation Commission debates first appeared on Arizona Capitol Times.

Want to save hundreds of millions of dollars on care for children with significant disabilities? There’s a remarkably effective way: just don’t provide all of the necessary care.

We wouldn’t call it that, of course.

We’d call it “savings.”

That distinction is at the heart of Arizona’s increasingly contentious debate over Parents as Paid Caregivers.

The confusion starts with the name.

Parents as Paid Caregivers, or PPCG, sounds like a program that pays parents simply for taking care of their children. It isn’t.

First, PPCG isn’t a separate “program” or disability service at all. Even the July Arizona Auditor General report at the center of the recent controversy calls PPCG a “service delivery model.” In plain English, PPCG does not create a new service or authorize additional care. It expands the existing direct-care workforce by allowing qualified, trained, and certified parents to provide services already assessed and authorized for their children.

Second, these are not simply ordinary parenting responsibilities. Parents are expected to feed, dress and supervise a child. But specialized tube feeding, transferring a growing teenager who cannot move independently, or providing intensive disability-related care long after a child would ordinarily be independent is something different. Arizona recognizes that difference, too: extraordinary care, beyond what would ordinarily be expected of a parent of a child without a disability.

Those distinctions must be clarified when we talk about cost.

The service existed before the parent caregiver did

If a qualified non-parent caregiver provides an authorized hour of care, Medicaid pays for that service. If a qualified parent provides that same authorized hour, Medicaid pays the same.

The child’s need didn’t change. The work didn’t change. Only the worker did.

AHCCCS, Arizona’s Medicaid agency, made the same point in its formal response to the recent audit: “The State’s obligation to cover the authorized service does not disappear.”So if Arizona removed parents from the paid workforce tomorrow and other qualified caregivers filled every shift, where would the savings come from?

They wouldn’t.

There is, however, a very effective way to make the expenditure disappear.

No one provides the necessary service.

Arizona knows what that looks like.

The “cheaper” alternative has a cost

For years, Arizona struggled with a serious direct-care workforce shortage. People could qualify for long-term care services and have necessary care authorized without enough workers available to provide it. When Arizona sought permanent federal authority for paid parent caregiving, AHCCCS specifically identified the historical workforce shortage and access-to-care challenges as reasons for the model.

An unfilled shift generates no Medicaid claim.

It also generates no care.

Calling that lower spending a success is like celebrating an understaffed fire department for coming in under budget when it couldn’t answer every call. No one would call that efficiency. We would ask why the calls went unanswered.

Research on Medicaid home and community based services has also found that receiving HCBS can reduce reliance on costly emergency and inpatient care. The cost of an unfilled shift may simply move elsewhere in the healthcare system, like costly emergency services, crisis care, and institutionalization.

We have already seen what the cheaper model looks like in Arizona. We called it a direct-care workforce crisis.

What the audit actually tells us

History matters when we return to the recent state audit fueling much of the controversy over PPCG spending.

The report criticized aspects of the state’s implementation and oversight, although AHCCCS formally disagreed with all four findings directed to the agency. One thing the audit did not find was evidence of widespread fraud by parent caregivers.Importantly, its largest projected reduction in spending came from decreasing actual services to children with disabilities. The audit estimated Arizona could have reduced fiscal year 2026 spending by $133 million to $493 million had a new age-based standardized assessment approach to total services for disabled children remained in effect last fall.

That approach lasted only 16 days for a reason.

AHCCCS implemented the Home and Community Based Services Needs Tool (HNT) on Oct. 1, 2025, then paused it in mid-October amid serious legal and operational concerns and fully reversed decisions made under it. The agency subsequently revised its approach, including developing an Extraordinary Care Review process, with revised implementation planned for December.

Those projected hundreds of millions were not dollars auditors discovered being stolen or misused by parents. They were estimates of reduced spending on underlying disability services when the assessment approach resulted in less authorized care to children.

That is a separate issue entirely from who is allowed to provide services once they are authorized.

Again, the care costs the same regardless of the caregiver’s last name.

So what are we actually saving?

Arizona should scrutinize every Medicaid dollar. It should enforce its rules and maintain strong oversight. But policymakers and journalists warning about the “exploding cost” of PPCG must answer the question their own argument raises:

What care, exactly, should Arizona stop paying for?

If the answer is parent-provided care, replacing the parent with another worker does not produce the savings. Arizona still pays for the service.

The savings appear only when less necessary care is paid for or delivered.

If that is what we mean by controlling the “exploding cost” of PPCG, we should all be willing to say so plainly.

There is a profound difference between efficiency and unmet need. Real efficiency reduces unnecessary costs without reducing access to necessary care or destabilizing the workforce that provides it.

But if Arizona spends less because necessary care doesn’t reach the child, that is not efficiency.

It is unmet need.

The cheapest Medicaid service will always be the one someone does not receive.We should stop calling that savings and start looking at its true cost.

Amy Haley is Director of Communication and Public Affairs at Raising Voices Coalition, a nonpartisan Arizona nonprofit advocating for the state’s disability community. She leads the organization’s work building relationships with lawmakers and telling the stories behind Arizona’s disability policy.

The post The true cost of Arizona’s ‘savings’ first appeared on Arizona Capitol Times.

PHOENIX — The lone incumbent seeking reelection to the state’s utility regulatory agency is defending the panel’s decisions to cut programs that encourage use of renewable energy and eliminate most rebates for energy efficiency purchases.

And Republican Kevin Thompson said while he has nothing against solar, the technology has not yet come far enough to make it reliable — even in a state with so much sunshine.

“Battery technology is not where it needs to be to cover nighttime,” he said during a televised debate Tuesday at KAET-TV, the Phoenix PBS affiliate, among candidates who are running for the two open seats on the five-member Arizona Corporation Commission.

Consider, he said, a dust storm that hit the Phoenix area last year about 3 p.m., the beginning of peak electricity demand. He said Arizona Public Services and Salt River Project, the two utilities that serve the area, lost more than 2,000 megawatts of solar power. Thompson said that is the equivalent of one of the three units at the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station going offline.

“And they had to go to the natural gas ‘peakers’ to keep the grid up and running,” he said, referring to power plants that can be easily turned on to meet peak needs, albeit with natural gas which is a fossil fuel.

What Thompson did not say, though, is that if Arizona did not have solar energy, utilities would have had to run their regular power plants to replace that electricity.

Democrat Clara Pratte said the commission should actually push utilities to pursue more electricity from solar. The key, she said, is affordability.

“Right now, solar energy is the cheapest form of energy on the market,” said Pratte. She is the co-founder of Navajo Power, which works with tribes to develop renewable energy.

Pratte said she is not opposed to an “all-of-the-above” approach to energy sources. But she said the emphasis should be on renewables “versus being dependent on imports that are coming into our market.”

“With solar, we can be generating our own energy and become energy independent at a time when we need extra energy,” Pratte said.

Fellow Democrat Jonathon Hill said he, too, believes the commission should be pursuing “balance.”

“But they also shouldn’t be putting their thumb on the scale,” he said. And that, Hill said, means not just promoting one source over another but also not creating disincentives for people to pursue renewable energy.

He pointed out that the commission just last month allowed two utilities to reduce what they pay customers who have rooftop solar for the amount of excess electricity they generate into the grid.

Thompson defended that decision.

“Ratepayers were subsidizing other ratepayers to have solar on their house,” he said. More to the point, Thompson argued that was not fair because it wasn’t helping lower-income people who need the most financial relief.

“Right now the only people purchasing rooftop solar are the middle and upper-middle class individuals that can afford it. And it’s the low-income and fixed-income folks that are subsidizing that,” Thompson said.

Hill responded that if Thompson and his fellow Republican commissioners are so interested in helping those on limited income, the panel would not have voted in July to repeal separate energy efficiency rules that provided breaks to customers who purchased things designed to save energy, “to do the things that will ultimately drive utility costs down.”

Thompson said the decision was the result of the commission reviewing energy efficiency programs that had been in place for decades, all without being evaluated for how effective or useful they were at achieving their goals.

Some, he said, made no sense.

“We were subsidizing homebuilders to install energy-efficient appliances,” Thompson said, to the tune of $250 million a year, all paid for from surcharges on rates paid by utility customers. “Can we even find a non-energy-efficient appliance nowadays? No.”

Ditto, he said, for paying customers to install shade trees.

Anyway, Thompson said, the commission did not eliminate everything, keeping programs that paid customers to install things like weatherstripping, insulation and even high-efficiency air conditioning units, “the things that actually make an impact on people’s bills.”

Pratte did not dispute that the costs of utility programs designed to improve electric efficiency have been passed on to all customers. But she called it minimal.

For example, Tucson Electric Power in 2024 estimated the average customer’s monthly bill went up about $2.31 a month. But the company said that the reduction in power usage benefited customers by postponing or avoiding the need to build new power plants.

Pratte said that price tag is worth paying.

“The long-term impact of those energy efficiency standards were really impactful in saving money in the long term,” she said. “That’s where we have a difference of opinion on what is effective and what is not.”

Moderator Ted Simons asked Thompson about claims by those who were behind the energy efficiency standards that they helped stabilize utility bills, stabilize grid reliability, and reduce pollution.

Among those making those claims is current Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes — then a Republican on the commission in 2010 — who helped create the standards in the first place. But Thompson sniffed at the assertion.

“I think if you look at it, the people who were behind that were the people who were making money off of those programs,” he said. “Again, it wasn’t helping the people that it was intended to help.”

Those decisions to scrap the programs were shared by Nick Myers who, like Thompson, ran for reelection.

Myers, however, was not at the Tuesday event to defend his votes. That’s because in the Republican primary, while Thompson placed first among the three contenders for two slots on the ballot, Myers ran third behind state Rep. Ralph Heap.

Heap also was not at the Tuesday event and has declined to participate in debates. He also is in trouble with the Citizens Clean Elections Commission, which is investigating whether he failed to disclose money spent buying campaign signs before he got certified for public funds for his campaign.

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The post Big agency requests meet Arizona’s stagnant revenue picture first appeared on Arizona Capitol Times.

PHOENIX — Adrian Fontes wants to get as many Arizonans as he can inoculated.

But in this case, it isn’t against the latest virus. It’s against the misinformation that the Democratic secretary of state says spreads every time there’s an election.

Fontes has set up a website — “arizona.vote” — he hopes will counter that misinformation by giving voters reliable, easily accessible information about how Arizona’s elections work before the next controversy, rumor or false claim takes hold.

“You never know what’s the next little monster that’s going to rear its ugly head,” he said.

“But the reality is, the efforts we are engaged in now are confidence builders against the potential of those little monsters,” Fontes said. “And we prepare folks to understand how the systems work so that they, themselves, are better equipped to deal with the potential questions.”

That question of confidence is not just a local issue.

President Trump himself has repeatedly questioned the security of the election system, most recently with his ongoing efforts to say mail voting is inherently unreliable.

Some Arizonans still contend that Trump won the 2020 race despite the final official tally showing that Biden defeated him by 10,457 votes.

That election led Republican state senators to hire an organization known as Cyber Ninjas, a company with no significant election-auditing experience, to review all the ballots cast in Maricopa County in hopes of finding evidence that could overturn the result. That review did not change the election outcome.

In fact, the hand-count audits conducted as part of Arizona’s regular post-election procedures found no discrepancies in Maricopa County in the 2020 election. They concluded that Biden actually won by a larger margin than tabulators initially reported. 

But “arizona.vote” isn’t aimed specifically at conspiracy theories.

The website provides basic information, like registration deadlines. This year, that is Oct. 5 for those who want to vote in the Nov. 3 general election. The site also includes instructions for getting an early ballot for those not on the Active Early Voting List and what identification is required for those casting ballots in person.

Voters can also track their ballots to confirm they were received and counted, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.

But Fontes said the website is also being designed to inoculate against situations “when some knucklehead gets out there and starts saying dumb crap about our elections.”

Debunking misinformation

Consider, he said, the demand for paper ballots.

“Well, in Arizona, all of our votes are cast on paper ballots,” Fontes said, with those ballots fed into tabulators that do the counting.

That still doesn’t satisfy some who insist that the totals are unreliable. But Fontes said that, rumors notwithstanding, the tabulators are not linked to the internet. They also undergo mandatory “logic and accuracy testing,” where a batch of sample ballots with known results is fed through tabulators to ensure they count accurately.

Arizona law already requires a random hand-count audit after every election, where a certain number of races from a certain number of precincts — all chosen by party officials — are tabulated by hand to see whether the totals match what the machines counted.

Still, that hasn’t always proven enough for everyone.

Two Cochise County supervisors, both Republicans, were indicted after the 2022 election for attempting to conduct a full hand count. Peggy Judd took a plea deal; charges against Tom Crosby are still pending.

Mohave County Supervisor Ron Gould, also a Republican, went to the Arizona Supreme Court in his unsuccessful bid to get immunity from possible prosecution by Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes for his own efforts to demand a full hand count.

As recently as Sunday, Republican Abe Hamadeh still claimed he won the 2022 race for attorney general, despite the final tally showing Mayes beat him by 280 votes. He blamed Democrat Katie Hobbs, who at the time was the secretary of state.

Political implications of misinformation

Claims about election irregularities have political implications.

Stephen Richer, the incumbent Maricopa County recorder, was ousted in the Republican primary in 2024 by Justin Heap, who complained of “historically low voter confidence.” Heap went on to win the general election.

And just this past month, Republican state Rep. Alexander Kolodin, hoping to defeat Fontes in November, raised similar claims.

“There’s no doubt that confidence in our elections here in Arizona is at an all-time low,” he said during a televised debate. “And the responsibility of that sits squarely on the shoulders of Secretary Fontes.”

That assertion, however, may not be accurate.

In an opt-in online survey of 948 registered voters last year, weighted to reflect political and other demographics, pollster Mike Noble asked about their confidence in elections. He found 70% said they were “totally confident.”

That included 77% of Republicans and 75% of Democrats, while political independents — about a third of all registered voters — dragged down the average, with just 58% expressing confidence.

Noble said that differs sharply from when he conducted the same survey in 2021, at the height of the Cyber Ninjas audit, when confidence was just 58%. He also noted that it was a highly partisan response, with just 40% of Republicans expressing confidence versus 80% of Democrats.

“The bipartisan alignment suggests that successful election administration and the passage of time have helped heal some wounds from previous electoral controversies,” Noble said.

While Fontes is the state’s chief election official, county recorders and supervisors in each of the 15 counties run the elections, with a mix of Republicans and Democrats.

“The problem is there are people out there who are motivated to sow distrust even if the little issue that might pop up is minor and easily explained,” Fontes said. “Their goal is to capitalize on mistrust. And our goal is to make sure the public is inoculated against the potential mistrust.”

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