PHOENIX — The attorney for the state’s largest utility says Arizonans should be precluded from voting on a renewable energy mandate because they were not told when signing petitions that a California billionaire is behind the measure.
Arizona law specifically requires that initiative petitions list the sponsoring organization, attorney Brett Johnson told Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Daniel Kiley. He said that’s more than a procedural requirement.
“What if it is an offensive group that is trying to logroll a situation through the state of Arizona?” Johnson asked. And what, he asked, if that name would turn off voters?
“So, instead, they come up with a flowery organization name that has been marketed all over the country and the communications people say, ‘If you use this name, we’ll be able to logroll this initiative through,’” he said.
Johnson told Kiley that’s what happened here.
He said the initiative to mandate that half of all electricity produced in Arizona by 2030 be produced from renewable sources initially listed no sponsoring organization when the paperwork to begin circulating petitions was filed in February. Only later was Clean Energy for a Healthy Arizona established as a limited-liability company and listed as a sponsor.
Johnson contends that NextGen Climate Action is the true sponsor and should have been listed on petitions as such. He said that organization, a political action committee run by California billionaire Tom Steyer, provided the resources to set up the committee and all but about $320 of the nearly $4.5 million to collect the signatures and put the measure on the November ballot.
Johnson said the failure to list the sponsoring organization means that none of the more than 480,000 signatures collected is valid.
But Jim Barton, representing initiative organizers, told Kiley that Johnson is off base.
He said no one has attempted to hide the involvement of NextGen.
A public report filed in April, while signatures were still being gathered, shows that NextGen by that point had put in $750,000 in cash and more than $200,000 in “in-kind” contributions, including paying for petition circulators as well as staffing and overhead for the Arizona committee. The latest report, filed earlier this month — after the deadline for submitting petitions — put NextGen’s total at $4.46 million.
Barton said being the prime source of the dollars does not equate to being the sponsor of the ballot measure, at least not as defined under Arizona election law. He told Kiley that adopting Johnson’s argument would mean that the failure to list each and every donor as a sponsor would disqualify measures from the ballot.
Hanging in the balance is whether voters get a say on the matter.
Pinnacle West Capital Corp., the parent company of Arizona Public Service, is financing the effort to keep the measure off the November ballot. So far, the company has put more than $7.5 million into Arizonans for Affordable Energy, the campaign organization it formed, to quash the initiative.
Kiley is expected to rule within days on whether he will allow the challenge to the petitions to proceed to a full-blown trial.
