Scottsdale Rep Leading the Fight Against Hobbs: Is He Asking the Right Questions or Being an Opportunistic Politician?

As we have covered recently, since the November election life has gotten harder for Governor Katie Hobbs. The Republican advantage in both the State House and the State Senate has expanded, meaning that the road to Hobbs bringing anything on her agenda to fruition got much longer and more difficult. We predicted that Republicans would be jockeying for position to take shots at her, and it didn’t take long.

Leading the fight last week was Scottsdale’s own Representative Alex Kolodin. Kolodin has long been a bomb-thrower, albeit one with what some could occasionally say comes with a somewhat tenuous grasp of the facts. So when he called out Governor Hobbs for essentially undercounting her budget by $350 million, eyebrows were certainly raised.

This comes after a tough few months for Hobbs, even leaving aside the unfortunate outcome of the November election. In November her Director of the Office of Tourism Lisa Urias was pressured to resign when merited allegations of self-dealing with a contract came to light. Even more salient to this current issue however was last week’s announcement that the Director for the Office of Strategic Planning and Budgeting Sarah Brown would also be leaving. Kolodin’s tweet came only one day after that announcement.

The timing of this departure is very odd indeed; normally such announcements would be timed for the end of the year for a more orderly-appearing process. This announcement, followed directly by a charge of an additional $350 million request, gives the appearance that Brown was involved in some way in the need for that additional request, and that she was pressured to fall on the sword. All of this is speculative, but timing is very rarely accidental in politics.

Hobbs is of course attempting to point the finger back at Republicans for politicizing everything. In her January 13th speech, she stated, “For too long, politicians have been focused on the wrong things – chasing headlines, playing politics, and looking toward their next election or their next office rather than standing up for the people we represent.” And she’s not wrong. It is clear that the next two years will be chock full of gotchas, of moments designed to demonize the other side (and this goes for both sides, even if the Republicans have more opportunities to use the bully pulpit.

But it does feel like Kolodin did key in on something important: a significant degree of financial malfeasance, albeit likely more a result of incompetence than ill intent. It seemed for a while that Hobbs’s nightmare honeymoon period of poor delegation choices at the start of her term was over, but Kolodin’s charge makes me believe that it went deeper than just a bad first few months.