Happy opening day of the 2026 legislative session, readers!
And welcome to a big day for the Agenda newsletters.
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Lawmakers from Tucson and around the state are in Phoenix today as the Arizona Legislature kicks off this year’s session.
It’s not just the banging of a gavel. Big-wig lawmakers are setting the schedule as we speak and Gov. Katie Hobbs is about to give her State of the State speech, setting the tone from the Governor’s Office (and campaign trail) this year.
Over the next few months, lawmakers will introduce somewhere well over 1,500 bills on everything from abortion to short-term rentals. Along the way, they’ll use procedural tricks to give their bills an edge or block bills from the other party.
If you’re not a state official, lobbyist or reporter, the legislative session could look like a cloud of chaos emanating from the state Capitol. Heck, we still struggle to keep up on busy days.
But if you keep a few simple things in mind, the process gets a whole lot clearer. That’s why we put together a special cheat sheet for Tucsonans who want to keep track of the Legislature without getting overwhelmed.
If you like cheat sheets that help you know what the deal is, then click this button and we’ll keep them coming!
GOP sets the rules
First off, there are a few names you’re going to see all over the news about the legislative session.
Nobody wields more power at the Capitol than Hobbs, Senate President Warren Petersen and House Speaker Steve Montenegro, as our sister newsletter, the Arizona Agenda, laid out last week.
Petersen and Montenegro, both Republicans, control the flow of legislation. A bill moves when they allow it to move. If they want it dead, it never sees daylight. If they want to move forward, it suddenly becomes fast tracked.
But Democrats have an ace up their sleeves. Even if Petersen and Montenegro shepherd a bill through both the Senate and House, they still have to contend with Hobbs’ veto stamp.
If Hobbs, a Democrat who’s earned the title of “Veto Queen” in her first three years in office, doesn’t want to sign the bill, then it’s effectively killed. (Last year, Hobbs vetoed 178 bills, surpassing the record she set in her first year.) Thats why Republican lawmakers are increasingly sending referenda to the ballot for you to decide — Hobbs can’t veto those.
Petersen and Montenegro also pick committee chairs, the powerful gatekeepers who decide which bills get hearings and which ones are dead on arrival.
If you’re looking at the Legislature from Southern Arizona, here is one of the most important things to remember: Most of your state representatives and senators are Democrats, which means most of their bills won’t get a hearing of any kind.
It’s not necessarily a question of the merits of each bill, it’s just that Republican chairs don’t often let Democratic-sponsored bills get a hearing.
Republicans have the majority. And at the Capitol, majority rules.
Southern Arizona’s players
Priya Sundareshan (left) and Nancy Gutierrez (right).
About a dozen lawmakers hail from the greater Tucson area — and they’re mostly Democrats.
We laid out who they are for you last week, so we won’t rehash everything.
But the key point to remember is that two Tucson-area lawmakers — Priya Sundareshan and Nancy Gutierrez — serve in Democratic leadership in the Senate and House, respectively.
They play an outsized role in whipping up support to push legislation forward and, just as importantly, killing Republican legislation on floor votes.
When Gutierrez spoke to the Democrats of Greater Tucson last week, she said Democrats have three priorities this year:
Focus on affordability, like taking on rising utility rates and out-of-state groups buying up housing
Enforce accountability measures for school vouchers
Address healthcare costs amid the loss of funding for rural hospitals and cuts to essential services
What to expect
Every legislative session starts the same way: a rush of bills designed to spark outrage, applause, or yes, Agenda headlines — with little expectation they’ll ever reach the governor’s desk.
There’s a reason we call it “silly season.”
Bills with any legs will get multiple committee hearings, and floor votes. You’ll start seeing headlines like “Legislative panel OKs controversial bill” as high-profile legislation make its way through the process.
Then comes “crossover week” in late February. That’s the deadline for a bill to move from one chamber to the other, where it will get another set of hearings and floor voters.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, lawmakers will likely take a little “legislative spring break.” While Petersen, Montenegro and Hobbs hash out the budget, most lawmakers head back to their districts or take vacations.
All the while, you’ll see news stories about Hobbs vetoing bills. The big-time vetoes often get immediate backlash from GOP lawmakers. (The governor is required by law to give an explanation for her vetoes, which often are pretty interesting. You can read them all here.)
Technically, the Legislature is supposed to wrap up its business within 100 days. But lawmakers routinely stay in session long after the 100-day mark. Last year, they didn't adjourn sine die until June 27.
The main sticking point for the 2025 session was the budget, the only thing lawmakers are actually required to do.
The 2026 budget conversation kicked off on Friday when Hobbs started to talk about her State of the State speech with reporters and called for a bigger standard deduction, which would essentially be a tax cut for the middle class.
But it’ll get much more serious after Hobbs reveals her full budget proposal on Friday.
But the budget won’t be the only big debate you'll hear about over the next few months.
Here are just a few big issues we’ve got our eyes on:
The renewal of Prop 123, which provides about $300 million per year in additional money for schools from the state land trust, will be a fight in public and behind closed doors.
The Trump administration is signaling that Phoenix will be the next Democratic-controlled city to see ICE and Border Patrol agents stopping people on the street. Trump officials have swept through a half-dozen cities, from Los Angeles to Minneapolis, and it always leads to conflict in the streets and between local and federal officials. Tucson hasn’t been mentioned much so far, but that can change quickly.
Democrats put school vouchers, better known as ESAs, back on their list of talking points. But in an election year, Hobbs might feel even more pressure to leave the program untouched. She has gradually backed off her first-year demand that the $1 billion voucher program be scrapped.
Hobbs also told reporters on Friday that Colorado River negotiations will be a big part of her agenda this year.
The fight between Hobbs and Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman, leader of the Freedom Caucus, will continue this year. Hoffman has a big role in deciding whether Hobbs’ nominees to head state agencies get confirmed. He’s gleefully put the kibosh on numerous candidates, including Pima County Public Health Director Theresa Cullen three years ago.
Those are just a few of the debates you’ll be hearing about. There will be plenty of others, including some we won’t see coming until a crisis emerges. Last session, for example, one of the fiercest debates was over funding the state’s Division of Developmental Disabilities.
And there you have it, folks. Those are the broad strokes of the legislative session.
We’ll keep you in the loop as the session progresses as both the Tucson Agenda and our colleagues with the Arizona Agenda will have frequent dispatches out of the Legislature.
IN OTHER NEWS
Out in the streets: Tucsonans protested at Reid Park and in front of Republican Rep. Juan Ciscomani’s office on Saturday, after an ICE agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in Minnesota, KGUN’s JJ McKinney reports. Protesters called for “ICE Out of Tucson” and slammed Ciscomani for supporting the Trump administration’s deportation program and the U.S. attack on Venezuela.
Apples and oranges: Local immigration activists and elected officials are preparing for the same kind of sweeping crackdowns that have led to street protests and a fatal shooting in cities like Minneapolis and Chicago, writes Arizona Daily Star columnist Tim Steller. There have been a few false alarms lately in Tucson, with activists and reporters rushing to the scene of what they heard was an ICE raid, but turned out to be routine law enforcement. Still, considering “the apparatus of the federal government is being deployed against the heartland of America,” Steller said he won’t “begrudge anybody their knee-jerk responses to apparent federal agents assembling in our neighborhoods.”
A tale of two cities: The recent green light the Marana Town Council gave to a data center project reflects public opinion, just like the Tucson City Council’s rejection of Project Blue reflected what Tucsonans wanted, writes Tucson Sentinel columnist Blake Morlock. Still, Marana residents now have to deal with the data center’s huge demand on the power grid, along with the society-level concerns over artificial intelligence.
“To quote virtually every character in the Star Wars universe: ‘I have a bad feeling about this,’” Morlock writes.
Not everybody agrees: Even though Marana officials approved the rezoning for the data centers, some Marana residents are trying to put the rezoning on the ballot so voters can decide, Madison Thomas reports for KGUN. The organizer of the effort, Jordan Greenslade, needs to round up 1,360 signatures.
Zigging and zagging: The Arizona State Museum on the campus of the University of Arizona has been closed since the Arizona Board of Regents nixed a $50 million funding request more than a year ago, the Arizona Luminaria’s Carolina Cuellar reports. Now, UA officials are planning to open the museum back up, but in a different building, one that won’t require $50 million.
Our humble funding request to you, dear reader, isn’t anywhere close to $50 million. Just a few dollars a month keeps our doors open.
Toxic discharge: The company running the South32 Hermosa mine in the Patagonia Mountains after the mine discharged a potentially toxic heavy metal, the Star’s Henry Brean reports. State environmental regulators found antimony in water released by the mine into Harshaw Creek that was above the limit allowed by the state. The discovery means the company will have to improve its water treatment process, but didn’t pose a health risk to people and animals that use the creek, state officials said.
POLITICAL CALENDAR
Here are the top events this week for those who want a front row seat to local politics.
Pima County Republican Club meets on Tuesdays at 11:30 a.m. at The Kettle just west of I-10 on 22nd St.
The Regional Transportation Authority has two in-person meetings this week to discuss RTA Next. On Tuesday, they will meet at the El Pueblo Activity Center, Building 9 101 W Irvington Road, from 5:30 to 7 p.m. A second meeting will be held on Wednesday at the South Tucson City Hall from 5:30 to 7 p.m.
The Pima Community College Governing Board meets Wednesday at their midtown offices on Broadway at 5:30 p.m. The agenda can be found here and the live-stream is here.
TODAY’S LAUGH
We almost put a link for the Rio Nuevo Board meeting on Tuesday at 1 p.m.
They meet virtually so it would be easy to post the Zoom link. Except the link is in the agenda, which hadn’t been posted by Sunday afternoon.
By comparison, Pima College, Oro Valley and TUSD had all of their ducks in a row by Sunday (and probably earlier than that.)
Rio Nuevo officials state their agendas are available 24 hours before the meeting, which is the absolute bare minimum for transparency.
1 CORRECTION: The original version of this was incorrect. We wrote that Stringham was running for county attorney. He ran for county recorder.