Slow burn

Lessons soon to be learned … He didn’t claw back the endorsement — yet … And Legos come up a lot in Arizona politics.

Republican Rep. David Marshall opened a sobering ad hoc study committee hearing on fire preparedness last week with harrowing memories of 2002, when the Rodeo-Chedeski Fire incinerated 550,000 acres — and came close to swallowing up Show Low.

“When the Rodeo-Chedeski Fire hit, I was manager at the Walmart in Show Low,” Marshall told members of the blue ribbon committee he leads. “We had one way in and one way out. It took three hours to evacuate that part of the mountain. My job at that time was to make sure all the firefighters were fed well — with all the food we had in Walmart. I lived there for 10 days. They stationed a fire truck in front of Walmart.”

Marshall then recalled this January’s Palisades Fire in California that burned 23,000 acres, killed 12 people and consumed nearly 7,000 homes as hurricane-force winds drove flames through an area that had received almost no rainfall in the past eight months.

Arizona remains primed for just such a disaster, he said.

“Hopefully, through this ad hoc hearing, we’ll learn enough to put together a plan to preserve what we have in Arizona,” Marshall, a former cop turned minister, said. “We want to come up with some solutions for what we can do, the needs of our Forestry Department and what kind of appropriations we need to raise so we can defend our forests.”

But as the subsequent four-hour hearing revealed, Arizona — and the US Forest Service — have largely squandered the nearly 23 years that have passed since the Rodeo-Chedeski Fire underscored the frightening new era of megafires.

Ambitious efforts to thin forests, scale up firefighting capabilities, restore natural low-intensity wildfires and spur changes in building standards to make communities more fireproof have largely faltered.

Year by year, visionary efforts like the Four Forests Restoration Initiative have fallen far short of the initial goals.

Meanwhile, the problem has become steadily worse — as Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management Director Tom Torres explained in his presentation.

That’s partly because the state is now in the grip of perhaps the worst drought in 1,000 years.

But it’s mostly because cities and counties have rushed to approve construction of new homes and businesses in the Wildlands Urban Interface (WUI) — without adopting fire-hardened building codes or even planning for evacuations.

Statewide, the number of homes built in the high-risk WUI zone has increased by 124% — these days, an alarming 1.5 million homes are in high-risk areas.

Pinal County has seen the most explosive growth, a 224% increase in the number of homes in the high-risk WUI area. That means 128,000 homes are potentially in the path of wildfires, up from 39,000, according to Torres.

The number of WUI homes in Gila County has grown by 41%, and in Navajo County, it’s a 58% increase.

But in the decades since the Rodeo-Chedeski Fire, none of those counties have adopted building codes intended to prevent embers from an approaching wildfire from setting whole blocks on fire all at once.

The initial hearing for the blue ribbon task force focused mostly on the scope of the problem.

But the committee is ultimately charged with coming up with a statewide strategy to prevent catastrophic loss.

The problems that the committee, which is packed with stakeholders from various industries across the state, is trying to address are myriad.

• Salt River Project and Arizona Public Service spoke about their efforts to keep power lines from sparking a California-style calamity.

• The Professional Fire Fighters of Arizona issued a desperate plea for the state to support Arizona’s 141 rural fire districts. They’re often the first to respond to a brush fire, but are starved for resources.

• The U.S. Forest Service has struggled for 30 years to reinvent the timber industry to deal with the thickets of small trees that now dominate millions of acres, after a century of big-tree logging, cattle grazing and fire suppression.

• Over much of Northern Arizona, tree densities have grown from 50 old-growth, fire-resistant trees per acre to thickets of small trees at densities closer to 1,000 per acre.

• The explosion of home construction in the most vulnerable areas has made the danger far worse.

• The spread of non-native grasses like buffel grass and red brome has altered the fire patterns in the desert south, fueling damaging wildfires.

The committee includes a bipartisan cadre of rural lawmakers who have been struggling for years with uncertain success to convince their urban colleagues to make wildfires a priority.

And the initial hearing represented a wrenching effort to sound the alarm in a state that, until recently, has left wildfire prevention and suppression to a largely distracted and overwhelmed US Forest Service.

The state has played mostly a bystander role when it comes to preparing for the worst, despite owning about 9 million acres of the 73 million acres in Arizona.

Another 13 million acres are privately owned and rely on fire districts and departments. The federal government owns another 30 million acres, and Tribal Trust land accounts for another 20 million.

Each year for the past five years, an average of 2,000 fires have burned an average of 443,000 acres annually, Torres told the committee. Most are human-caused.

But there are some slivers of good news.

The state has tripled its leased air resources for fighting fires in recent years. Last year, the state negotiated Good Neighbor Agreements with the Forest Service.

And Arizona has now taken over some of the timber sale preparation work from the Forest Service, which has been beset by budget problems tied to the chaotic effects of continuing budget resolutions as well as mounting, seemingly haphazard federal layoffs.

But even if the committee comes up with a statewide strategy to prevent and fight the growing wildfire threat, it doesn’t mean much if lawmakers don’t allocate the money to enact that plan.

Republican Rep. Walt Blackman, who also sits on the House Appropriations Committee, drilled into Torres’ presentation with questions about past budget allocations — including the disposition of some $75 million in one-time, mostly federal grants from the Biden administration’s stimulus and infrastructure bills.

A lot of the money went to post-fire mitigation and capital spending, with most of the money either spent or already committed to unfinished projects, according to the department’s legislative liaison.

Blackman, who represents the sprawling, forested Legislative District 6 alongside Marshall, was suspicious. He wanted more details about where the money had gone.

Marshall, on the other hand, wanted to know whether the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management’s budget was sufficient to keep Arizonans safe.

“I would say we could always use more,” Torres replied.

However, he noted the department has grown from 85 employees to 240 in recent years.

The hearing mostly exposed the sweeping breadth of the problem — and the complexity of a solution. Not to mention the massive amount of money it will take to solve, just as the state is bracing for another round of tight budgeting.

But Arizona has already squandered 23 years since Rodeo-Chedeski demonstrated the danger — followed by the Wallow Fire in 2011. The number of homes at risk has doubled — and the danger has only increased.

“We’re not here to have hearings and walk away without doing anything,” Marshall told the committee and audience. “You guys are providing the information we need. This legislative session, we had 10 to 12 bills for firefighters for like $100 million. We’re not going to see that because of the budget concerns we have right now. But without you, the forest would be burning down. Neighborhoods would be burning down. We have to come to some type of resolution so we can come together and do what we can.”

After finishing off some votes yesterday, Arizona’s lawmakers headed home for an unofficial spring break.

House members get nearly two weeks off —they’ll come back on May 20.

Senators won’t be back until May 28 — a three-week vacation!

Republican Rep. David Livingston, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, previously said he hopes to get a state budget hammered out by Memorial Day.

But it looks like that pipe dream isn’t coming true, considering the Senate isn’t coming back until two days later.

Three strikes: Three Trump aides fled Karrin Taylor Robson’s gubernatorial campaign because she ran campaign ads touting her Trump endorsement after the president gave a second endorsement to Congressman Andy Biggs, Axios reports. The Trump team said Robson ignored their advice to air the TV ads long before the president hedged his bets by also endorsing Biggs.

"It takes special skill to botch a GOP primary with the Trump endorsement, but unfortunately that's what this candidate has single-handedly assured," a GOP strategist said.

Government-sponsored brainrot: Kari Lake announced that her role overseeing the government-run media agency Voice of America will now involve injecting right-wing propaganda on the airwaves, the exact thing she said she wouldn’t do when first appointed to the position, the Phoenix New Times’ Morgan Fischer reports. Lake said on Twitter the government-run outlet is partnering with One America News Network — a far-right network hosted by Trump loyalist Matt Gaetz — who will “provide their newsfeed and video service free-of-charge.” The twice-failed Arizona candidate originally heeded administrative directives to dismantle Voice of America, but a federal judge shut down those efforts.

Consider backing the independent news we pour our effort into bringing you every day.

One domino down: The Arizona Supreme Court shut down a bid by Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman to get a judge tossed from his fake elector case because the judge had donated to Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes’ campaign, per Capitol Media Services’ Howie Fischer. Appellate Judge Andrew Jacobs donated $500 to Mayes before she was elected, and before she announced that a grand jury indicted Arizona’s slate of fake electors. The decision could have larger impacts on the defendants’ claims in a separate court case that Mayes is trying to suppress their First Amendment rights, and that case could determine if Hoffman and 10 other Republicans go to trial in January.

Appointments based on vibes: Legislative Republicans just advanced a bill to get rid of requirements for legislative appointees to state boards and commissions, while nearly simultaneously complaining that Gov. Katie Hobbs is sending unqualified directors to get confirmed in the Senate, the Arizona Mirror’s Caitlin Sievers writes. Senate President Warren Petersen’s SB1649 says people who serve on legislatively appointed groups like the Joint Legislative Budget Committee and special taxing districts don’t have to specialize in the subject matters they’re making decisions about.

Released time, long roots: A Vail school district recently reversed its decision to let the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints build an on-campus worship site, but the practice of releasing students for religious instruction is actually really common in Arizona, Lookout’s Tori Gantz reports. The “Parents’ Bill of Rights” law requires schools to excuse students for religious purposes and also mandates telling parents when their kids are being taught about gender or sexuality and includes an opt-in for sex education. But the whole religious release time practice dates back over a century to Christian groups’ attempts to convert Indigenous students.

Forgery fail: The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office announced an indictment against a petition circulator for the Arizona Abortion Access Act, KJZZ’s Camryn Sanchez reports. Anthony Harris allegedly forged signatures to get the constitutional right to abortion on the ballot, which voters passed last year, but the number of allegedly forged signatures would not have made a difference in qualifying the initiative for the ballot. He’s facing two felony charges and two misdemeanors.

Budgeting for chaos: Chandler City Council is hedging a lot of Trump-related bets in coming up with its annual budget, like setting aside money in case a recession hits. But the council is still planning to fund the city’s DEI Division, per the Chandler Independent’s Jason W. Brooks. They’re penciling in $772,000 for the three employees in the unit next fiscal year, and Councilmember OD Harris isn’t worried about federal intervention.

It’s not just seven U.S. states that depend on the Colorado River.

The “American Nile” also plays a key ecological role in the borderlands of Mexico and supplies 90% of Tijuana’s drinking water.

As negotiations about the river’s future unfold, Mexico is sure to have a seat at the table.

If you want to read the water news from south of the border, take the plunge and subscribe today!

This year’s version of the Starter Homes Act doesn’t seem to be going anywhere after House Speaker Steve Montenegro didn’t let it get a vote on the House floor, the Capitol Times’ Jakob Thorington reports.

The measure would force cities to loosen zoning restrictions to make homes cheaper to build, and therefore easier for first-time owners to purchase. A similar bill failed last year after Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed it. This year, it seems to be succumbing to the procedural hurdles that let a few powerful Republicans control a bill’s fate.

Our favorite part of the story, however, is a pro-starter homes advocacy group’s creative move to troll Montenegro’s stalling of the bill.

Americans for Prosperity sent the House speaker a custom Lego set of a home that has its own set of city zoning rules you have to follow to build, a recommended age of 38+ (the average age of first-time homebuyers in Arizona) and 450,000 Lego pieces to represent the median home price here. Republican Reps. Michael Carbone, Neal Carter and Julie Willoughby also got their own Lego sets.