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| Kill these Zombie Bills |
The Arizona House and Senate came back for a couple of days this week, sending a few bills to the Governor and moving a few others along in the process. Legislative leaders still revealed nothing about when we will see the budget and what it will contain. As we have noted before, passing a budget is the only thing they absolutely have to do each session. We are now hearing it may happen next week. Stay tuned. We are asking legislators to keep tax incentives for clean energy and to eliminate all of the tax breaks for data centers, plus fund the Arizona Heritage Fund, heat centers, and the Water Quality Fee Fund.
Please take action against these bad bills that just won't die!
SB1418 corporation commission; small modular reactors (Carroll) preempts counties – except Maricopa and Pima – from regulating the location of small modular nuclear reactors if they are co-located with high-load factor electricity user such as data centers. We have data centers locating here in our communities indiscriminately and using enormous amounts of water and electricity, plus providing very few sustainable jobs. Ask your representatives to say no to lax siting for nuclear and data centers. Please take action on SB1418 even if you have previously. It is likely to be voted on next week. Note that this is a new alert form. SB1332 Now: light rail expansion; feasibility review (Kavanagh) advanced this past week and could go to a Third Read vote next week too. SB1332 requires a biased study of light rail and attempts to pit it against other forms of transportation. Requiring an analysis that compares light rail and autonomous or semiautonomous vehicles is an apples to oranges comparison and provides no real beneficial information or benefits to our communities. Light rail is not in competition with other forms of transportation but rather augments them and is especially important to coordinate with buses, plus it is a key component of our transit system in the Phoenix area. Please speak up for light rail, even if it does not affect you directly. We know the majority in the Arizona Legislature want to refer something to the ballot and we expect that these twin referral bills may be on the list. SCR1001 citizenship; identification; contributions; early voting (Bolick) and HCR2001 citizenship; identification; contributions; early voting (Kolodin: Chaplik, Heap, et al) refer identical measures to the ballot to limit early voting and require all voters (even those voting mail ballots) to "show valid government-issued proof of identity." These bills would give the legislature the authority to shut down early voting too! |
SB1280 Public monies; Mexican wolf; Prohibition (Farnsworth) would prohibit the Arizona Game and Fish Commission from transporting Mexican gray wolf puppies into Arizona and also from spending any money for transporting wolf puppies into the state. |
| HB2758 McMullen Valley; eligible entities; groundwater (Griffin: Blackman) is among the worst water legislation moving through the process. The bill allows private water companies and a New York hedge fund, Water Asset Management, to engage in the interbasin transfer of groundwater from the McMullen Valley in La Paz County to elsewhere in La Paz County or to an active management area -- basically the Phoenix area. |
HB2975 state lands; solar score; maps (Heap: Marshall) prohibits the State Land Department from using solar score maps or other similar types of evaluation of state trust lands for its appropriateness for solar energy generation. This removes transparency and is contrary to the good planning. It is intended to be punitive of solar. Note, we are also watching the State Land Department continuation bill for harmful provisions on wind and solar. We will have more on that next week. |
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