Guests - Matt Neely, Kevin Thomson
Kathleen Winn opened the week with a promise she said she could keep for 25 straight days: a fresh example, each morning, of what she considers Governor Katie Hobbs's misuse of taxpayer money. From there the show turned to a colleague's forensic reading of the Pima County Attorney's own words, and closed with a sitting corporation commissioner making the case for keeping the panel in Republican hands. The thread running through all three was accountability — the argument that officials who hold powerful offices should be judged on whether they do the job, not on the ads they run.
The Fondomonte Payment: Reading the Governor's Water Ad
Winn began with a Hobbs campaign ad claiming the governor "fought back" against Fondomonte Arizona LLC, the Saudi-owned agricultural company that drew years of criticism for pumping Arizona groundwater. Winn's contention, drawn from the state's own open-book transparency system, was that the ad inverts what happened: rather than defeating the company, she argued, Hobbs paid it.
Winn walked through the transaction as it appears in the public record. After the administration declined to renew Fondomonte's Butler Valley leases and celebrated the end of its pumping, the Arizona State Land Department — an agency under the governor's purview — wrote the company a check for roughly $7 million, characterized in the system as a "miscellaneous operating expenditure." The listed funding source, she said, was the Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund — federal pandemic money created under the American Rescue Plan Act. Her objection was twofold: that the state paid a company it had just cast as the villain, and that it did so with COVID-relief dollars routed through a land agency. "It's called money laundering if you're in real estate," said Winn, who spent decades in the field, "and I was for many years."
She tied it to the broader water picture — what she called a debacle in the mismanagement of Central Arizona Project supplies, with allocations set to be cut back sharply — and to the Colorado River negotiations ahead. Her point for voters was about advertising and memory: "Please don't have a feeling about an ad and then decide you're going to vote for someone." She promised to document a new example each day, and returned repeatedly to what she framed as a pattern of moving money between agencies that should not commingle it.
Winn extended the same skepticism to Hobbs's running mate, former Mesa mayor John Giles, whom she said she knows personally. Giles may now be registered as an independent, she argued, but "he's always been to the moderate-to-liberal side," recruited Democrats to run for city council, and was never a Republican in practice regardless of his past registration. Presenting him as a former Republican speaking for the party, she said, misrepresents his record.
Matt Neely: A County Attorney in Her Own Words
Matt Neely — a colleague of Winn's at Bustos Media — joined in studio to dissect a written Q&A that Pima County Attorney Laura Conover gave the Green Valley News. Neely was precise about the format up front: he confirmed with reporter Kim Smith that the questions were sent to Conover, who wrote back her answers. "It was like an open-book essay test," he said — she could wordsmith at leisure, with no follow-ups. His point was not that the paper did anything wrong, but that readers should understand they were reading a curated statement rather than an interview.
The exchange that drew the most scrutiny concerned victims' influence over case outcomes. Conover's answer, Neely said, called the Arizona Victims' Bill of Rights one of the most powerful in the country and praised her office's Victim Services Division. He and Winn — who spent years working with crime victims through her anti-trafficking and missing-children work — found the answer disconnected from the cases in the news. They pointed to the murder of Paul Clifford, killed on Christmas Eve by assailants who, they said, lured him out on the pretense of a dead car battery, then shot and burned him; two of the three defendants, they noted, took plea deals to charges that did not include murder, leaving Clifford's widow without answers. Winn acknowledged the subject was painful to raise on air. Neely contrasted the pace of that case with how quickly the office moved against a man who intervened in a convenience-store theft — the "vigilante" case — arguing the priorities were backward.
Neely's sharpest legal objection was to a passage in which, he said, Conover equated a life sentence without parole to the death penalty — arguing that because such inmates die in prison, it amounts to capital punishment. Neely, noting Conover is a member of the bar, called the equivalence legally wrong, pointing to the Eighth Amendment and Supreme Court precedent that treat the two as fundamentally different, and argued that her stated blanket refusal to pursue the death penalty in any case pre-decides the application of law before any set of facts. He cited the downtown shooting — nine wounded — as the kind of case where, had victims died, a prosecutor should at least be able to weigh the question rather than foreclose it in advance.
The two worked through several more of Conover's answers. On the perception of lenient sentences, they said, she characterized critics — including, in her phrasing, loud voices from the retired former administration — as a minority who wrongly predicted "the sky would fall" when she took office, and cited a homicide rate below 2018–2019 levels. Neely and Winn countered that a beheading at a bus stop and roughly 20 assaults on the transit system in a year — police, they said, call it "the crime bus" — don't match the reassurance. They flagged her line that "anyone selling you the idea of a crime-free outcome is selling you snake oil," reading it as a swipe at the Tucson Crime Free Coalition — the advocacy group led by figures including Josh Jacobsen — and her statement that "America loves guns and private money-making prisons" as an attempt to blame the Second Amendment and private prisons for crime the office declines to prosecute.
Neely raised additional cases to illustrate the pattern he sees: a Banner nurse who, he said, received probation and time served after assaulting an unconscious patient experiencing seizures — an outcome Conover reportedly likened to unwanted contact "that happens in bars every night," which both found offensive given the victim's medical state; the Zobella Bennett case, in which a high-school guidance counselor received a one-year sentence after a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old student living in her home; and a church youth-group leader who, he said, received a lenient plea after sexual contact with minors. Winn, drawing on her own experience helping prosecute a serial predator who targeted babysitters, argued that some offenders cannot be "healed" and that resources belong with victims and their lifelong trauma, not with second and third chances for violent offenders. She and Neely contrasted Conover's approach with Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell's emphasis on consequences as a deterrent.
Both connected the prosecution question to immigration enforcement and public safety, citing the case of Julio Cesar Aguirre — a previously deported man, illegally back in the country, who they said terrorized a neighborhood a mile from the studio, killed a senior named Ricky Miller for his truck, and held a family hostage. Their argument was that sanctuary policies which impede ICE necessarily shield some violent offenders along with longtime law-abiding residents. Neely closed by encouraging listeners to call Conover directly during her scheduled Friday radio appearance and tell her that the demand for prosecution is not a partisan minority but a majority concerned with safety.
Kevin Thompson: Keeping the Corporation Commission in Conservative Hands
Kevin Thompson — a former Mesa city councilman now serving on the Arizona Corporation Commission — joined to discuss his reelection bid and the stakes for the five-member panel that regulates the state's utilities. He and fellow Republican Ralph Heap advanced from the primary; two Democrats, Jonathan Hill and Clara Pratt, await in the general. Thompson praised Pratt's utility background, calling the race likely to be contentious.
Asked how to unite Republicans after a bruising primary, Thompson pointed to the national contrast on energy. Democrats, he argued, are moving toward Green New Deal-style mandates and 100 percent renewables, while the commission's Republican majority has spent four years removing such policies in favor of an "all of the above" approach — coal, gas, nuclear, hydro, wind, or solar, chosen on reliability and affordability rather than ideology. He cited a dust storm the prior year in which, as blowing dust blocked the sun, SRP and APS together lost solar output equivalent to a Palo Verde nuclear unit and had to fall back on natural gas to keep the grid up — his illustration of why an all-renewable grid fails. California, he said, is now rolling back some of its own green mandates.
Thompson explained why the commission's power is easy to underestimate: its authority to make rules. Rules at the commission, he said, can't be overturned by the president of the United States — only by future commissioners, and undoing one typically takes three and a half to four years. His reelection goal is to "tie everything up into rulemaking," locking in the deregulatory changes so that a future Democratic majority couldn't quickly reverse them.
On rate cases, Thompson gave listeners a primer. A typical case, he said, is a fully litigated proceeding — an administrative law judge, hearings, and stakeholders including utility staff, the Residential Utility Consumer Office, individual ratepayers, and activist groups like the Sierra Club, all able to cross-examine utility executives. The Arizona Constitution allows a utility to recover its costs of providing service — equipment, labor, poles, wires, software — but not costs already recovered, all itemized in a public application on the commission's website. He pushed back on alarm over headline requests: "Nobody's ever gotten 14 percent while I've been on the commission." The commission has been transitioning from a "historic test year" model toward formula rates to smooth increases, he said, with the panel setting the final return on equity between what the consumer advocate and the administrative law judge recommend. On growth, his principle was that "growth pays for growth" — data centers, TSMC, and master-planned communities that strain the grid pay for their own impact rather than shifting it onto existing ratepayers, just as, in his Mesa days, developers built their own roads.
Thompson addressed two political matters directly. On the "renewable standard" Mayor Giles once pushed in Mesa, Thompson said that as chair of the sustainability committee he forced the policy into his committee, redlined it to strip its teeth, exempted the business community, and reduced it to a goal for city facilities rather than a mandate — because, reading the votes, he didn't have the Republicans on the council to defeat it outright. On a complaint that he and former seatmate Nick Myers reused campaign signs from an earlier race, Thompson said an attorney advised that already-paid-for signs have no remaining value and would have been discarded had they lost; most, he said, were put back up by others without his knowledge, and since Myers didn't advance, the signs are being replaced anyway. He directed voters to thompsonforcorp.com and urged a vote for both him and Heap to preserve the Republican majority.
When a headline crossed during the segment — John Giles calling the GOP "a lost cause" — Thompson rejected it flatly: "I refuse to give up on our party." Winn turned it into motivation, arguing that if Giles believes Republicans are finished, the answer is turnout: "We're going for 75 percent" in Pima County, she said, and "if Pima County shows up at 75 percent, miracles are going to happen all over the state."
Kathleen Winn: 'We Have a Job to Do'
Winn closed on the argument she has made all season — that personal feeling about a candidate is no excuse to sit out. "I don't care if you like them," she said. "I don't care if you never will go out to lunch or dinner with them. We have a job to do, and that's to get Republicans elected." She named ambivalence about some names on her own ballot and stressed that the people who want the movement to lose "love to create division."
She drew the contrast she sees at the top of the ticket. Hobbs and Giles, she argued, offer no real diversity — "two Democrats hail-marrying it in" — while Andy Biggs's running mate Sine Kerr brings agriculture, lawmaking experience, and Arizona roots, and is Hispanic without leading with it or pandering. Neither Hobbs nor Giles, she noted, will debate — which she took as reason enough to withhold a vote: "If they can't stand up to their opponents so you can get a clear idea of who they are and what they stand for, don't vote for them. I don't care what party you're in."
Her recurring instruction anchored the close: check your registration at the Pima County Recorder's dashboard, and do it now, with roughly 50 days until early ballots drop. The show, she said, would post the full ballot and walk through it "from the school board all the way up to governor" in the days ahead — and she noted the party had re-registered 18 Democrats the prior week, a trend she said appears on no poll. Marking 50 years this month since she moved to Pima County — "where I became an adult," where she got her first job — Winn framed the stakes as personal: "We are this close to restoring order, to restoring prosperity in this state," and she wasn't willing to see it slip away "on my watch."