Saturday, June 17
LD18’s three legislators met an inquisitive crowd of constituents at a Coffee With Constituents Chat at Beyond Bread on Speedway on June 17, 2023. Rep. Chris Mathis, Rep. Nancy Gutierrez and Sen. Priya Sundareshan fielded questions about school vouchers, light rail in Phoenix, flipping the Legislature, the power of letters to the editor and the water crisis.
School Vouchers: The wasteful, budget-depleting school vouchers were spent on private schools, which jacked up their tuition to match the $7,000 vouchers. Further, parents were wrongly saving the money to pay for college and not using it for Arizona public schools.
Flipping the Legislature: Mathis said there is a good possibility that in 2024 voters may end the 31-year lock that Republicans have in the state House. In LD17, MAGA Sen. Justine Wadsack and Christian Nationalist Rep. Rachel Jones are both vulnerable. “The people in those seats are nuts,” Mathis quipped. “Odds are we can pick up those seats.” This is because Democrats have two excellent candidates in Amy Fitch Heacock for Senate and Morgan Abraham for House.
Democrats can recapture an LD23 House seat. It is a heavily Democratic district in Yuma, and Republican Michele Pena narrowly won the seat by 3,000 votes out of 74,000 votes cast. Meanwhile, in LD2 in Phoenix, Republican Sen. Steve Kaiser announced in June he’d resign from the Legislature after clashes with far-right Republicans. This happened after Democrat Judy Schwiebert was elected to the state House in 2022 in a highly competitive district that leans Republican. Mathis said a Democrat has a good chance to pick up the Republican’s seat.
Housing/Homeless. The LD18 legislators decried that Republican lawmakers never gave a hearing to two bills that would have tackled the state’s affordable housing problems. Meanwhile, Sen. Justine Wadsack filed a bill to make homelessness a crime. This would be a way for Republicans to round up the homeless and jail them, funneling profits to the state’s private prison industry. (The bill failed.)
Letters to the editor: Rep. Gutierrez said that letters to the editor are very powerful. “They help voters understand the issues, give voice to one’s advocacy and remind people of happenings in the state legislature.
