The Buzz: Catching up with Arizona AG Kris Mayes

Transcript: The Buzz January 03, 2025

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2024 was a busy year for the office of Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes: continued opioid and other lawsuits aimed at protecting the state's residents, attempting to crack down on school voucher and sober living home scams, legal action against a foreign alfalfa farm and more. Just before the end of the year, we sat down with Mayes in a conference room at the Attorney General's office to discuss several topics.

Housing discrimination and renter protections:

"We are really aggressively pursuing the protection of renters because basically this is one of the biggest costs of living, the biggest pieces of cost of living for Arizonans. And so many Arizonans are suffering from an astronomical increase in rent cost, and I believe that some of that is the result of landlords who have been colluding with a company called RealPage."

The lawsuit alleges that the landlords who feed data into RealPage are colluding to fix prices at a rate that is as high as the market will allow. The Buzz covered this topic when the lawsuit was announced. At that time, RealPage and a number of landlords mentioned in the suit, and they did not respond to requests for comment.

"That's not okay. You know, more than 50% of all the apartment buildings in Tucson use this company and algorithm, and more than 75% in Phoenix do. So that basically means that a huge number of Arizona renters are the victims of collusion, which is an antitrust violation. So I sued them, all, nine landlords, plus RealPage for violating consumer fraud, our Consumer Fraud Act and for antitrust violations. From 2016 until today, the price of rent in Arizona has gone up by more than 75%. That's insane."

Opioid lawsuit settlement money:

"Arizona is going to receive about $1.2 billion overall. A little bit over half goes to cities, towns and counties, and a little bit less than half goes to the state. I think it's important that we get that money spent in an appropriate fashion, and that means combating addiction. The whole purpose behind the settlements in these lawsuits was to try to, number one, obviously punish these bad actors, but also to help solve the opioid crisis. And that means spending this money that's coming in, and it's a huge amount of money, on treatment, detox centers, education, abatement, making sure that people who have suffered from the opioid epidemic get help."

AG Mayes' office has been tracking spending of opioid settlement money. That money is being split between the state and municipalities around the state, and has gone to a variety of uses. One use that Mayes objects to is how Governor Katie Hobbs and the Arizona legislature used funds from the settlement to "backfill the prison system's budget." That included a $33,851,000 contract given to Cardinal Health, a company that settled with the state for its role in the opioid crisis, for Hepatitis C treatment.

"think at a minimum, they ought to give the money back that they spent on Cardinal Health. It's just outrageous and offensive to give any of this money back to one of the defendants. You know, it would be just laughable. For instance, if we spent money on Purdue Pharma or the Sackler family. I mean, you would never give the opioid funds back to the Sacklers, and yet we gave it back to Cardinal Health, you know? And so yeah, I'm calling on them to give that $33 million back."

Sober living home fraud:

"I have called this one of the greatest scandals in state government history. I think it was. This is a crisis that was made possible by the actions of, frankly, previous governors and previous AGs who did nothing to stop the supply of money going to these fraudsters who were setting up sober living homes, luring Native Americans down from the Navajo Nation, White Mountain Apache, the Hopi Nation and other other tribes to the valley with a promise that they would be treated for substance abuse issues, then not providing that treatment at all, in many cases, and collecting millions, and in some cases 10s of millions of dollars from AHCCCS the state's Medicaid program. And my office has now done well more than 100 prosecutions of sober living home fraudsters."

Empowerment Scholarship Account voucher fraud:

"originally it was established and it was narrow, and largely it was utilized, and I think appropriately for kids with special needs, kids with autism, those types of situations, but it has ballooned into a universal program that is coming up on a billion dollars. And then you add to the fact that there are very few safeguards against fraud, and you have what I call a big fat target for fraud, and that's what we, frankly, are finding. We've now done several prosecutions, which I think probably is just the tip of the iceberg."

Mayes also expressed concern about a recent Arizona Department of Education announcement that it would auto-approve expenses under a certain dollar value and audit them when the backlog is gone.

"The idea, I mean that it's only going to make a bad problem worse, and it's only going to invite more fraud. And you know, if Superintendent [Tom] Horne is having a hard time keeping up with the claims, then he should go to the legislature and ask for more staff, and the legislature should provide him with more staff. That is the answer. The answer is not to shovel more money out the door without asking any questions."

Interactions with President-Elect Donald Trump's administration:

"Arizona has just overturned the 1864 abortion ban in Arizona. And then to watch as anybody in Washington, DC tried to enforce a nationwide abortion ban or surveil women, that's also in Project 2025, as they seek reproductive care across state lines. Those are the kinds of things standing up for Arizonans rights that I will absolutely go to bat for in this new administration. We will work with the Trump administration wherever we can, and I certainly hope they continue, for instance, the FTCs focus on antitrust law, which we just talked about."

Resuming executions:

"There are111 people on death row, but 25 of them have had their appeals exhausted. In other words, those 25 are now death eligible, essentially, or could be executed. That careful review has been done, and I feel confident in the ability of the Department of Corrections to move forward. So I have asked the Arizona Supreme Court for a briefing schedule so that I can ask them for an execution warrant so that we can move forward with the execution of Aaron Gunches, who was accused and convicted of killing Ted Price. And I've spoken to Ted Price's family and the families of all 25 of these individuals are expecting justice to be done, and I think that's important to remember. We have to keep in mind the victims and the fact that this is the law of Arizona."

Water issues in rural Arizona:

"We do have public nuisance laws in Arizona that prevent any entity from harming an entire community or neighborhood and depriving that community of the ability to use their property and their land and to live in that community. And so I filed that nuisance lawsuit. I think I probably told [AZPM], when I talked to you, that that was kind of coming, or you could look for that, and sued the Saudi owned corporation called Fondomonte, which has pumped millions and millions of gallons of water out of Western Arizona in a place called the Renegras Plain in La Paz County, and has dewatered wells in the area, we allege, as a result of this, groundwater pumping."

Fondomonte issued a written response to AZPM when the lawsuit was announced. It can be found in this story.

Mayes also said this may not be the end of using nuisance law to fight groups that heavily pump groundwater and cause issues for nearby residents. When asked if she was referring to Riverview Dairy in Cochise County, she said yes.

"We had hundreds of people turn out [at a town hall meeting in Pearce, Arizona] to testify to the damage that's being done to them, people whose wells have gone dry because of the massive groundwater pumping, and people who have watched as the earth literally opened up fissures that are being caused by the groundwater pumping, and people's homes who are that would that are cracking under the because of the subsidence that's caused by that kind of pumping."

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