broadcast the broadcast is now starting all attendees are in listen only mode good morning everyone welcome to this morning's informal meeting of the maricopa county board of supervisors we will start with a roll call madam clerk good morning thank you supervisor sellers supervisor galvin supervisor hickman supervisor gallardo here chairman gates here and andrea cummings your all-male attorney is on the line wonderful thank you so much okay well we've got a lot on the go here so we'll jump right into it first of all we're going to be starting uh with our economic development presentations one of the important roles that we serve here at maricopa county is working with our partners on the development of this county and one of those important partners that we have and we've been involved with them for many years is the greater phoenix economic council and thrilled to have the head of gpec chris camacho with us today so chris if you'd like to join us thanks for being here all right good morning mr chairman good morning thanks for having me today uh i've been instructed to give a very brief update the uh the organization is doing extraordinarily well as we're coming off the heels uh there we go coming on the heels of being the fastest uh growing county sixth sixth year running and at the same time you're seeing a lot of corporate uh shifts across the u.s to more uh attractive areas from a tax and regulatory standpoint with strong labor markets and modernized infrastructure and so what i'm going to show you today is the rolling 12 months of activity that we have seen as an organization and what i'm going to maybe cover briefly there we go thank you is many of you know that we serve as the county's chief economic development entity and with that responsibility comes the work on the front end working with a number of global companies that are evaluating the greater phoenix region helping them through the due diligence process we also manage the brand and media component which is uh usually pretty favorable with the exception of times when we have to defend our regents brand and those examples could be on our water position power reliability can be on the labor force a number of different topics so we take that responsibility very seriously and then our third element of what we do for the county is focus routinely on the competitive position of the market and one of those examples will be working very closely with mag and other partners on helping champion the business views of areas like prop 400 and the region's transportation grid to other innovation assets which we've worked closely to drive in terms of the wearable technology institute as well as the blockchain institute here in the valley so all that being said i'm going to run through some some very quick numbers for you so you can see just the last rolling 12 months as i mentioned we're a july through june fiscal year and the results this past year i wish gpec and our partners and our communities in our county could take all the credit but i can tell you certainly there's been a massive level of interest over the last several years in the region greater phoenix would be considered one of those hot markets in the u.s very very similar to that of what we're seeing in austin and dallas atlanta charlotte there's a handful of markets that just routinely come up on virtually every national site selection review and as i said earlier many of those remarks are incumbent upon the labor supply as we're saying unemployment you know really less than four percent nationally what that creates is markets that have to compete not only on uh the relevant labor available in the community and in the region uh but also the pipeline that we're building for the future delivery for these companies so just so i make sure that the audience is clear and understands our job is is not necessarily in retail it's more so in the base industries we want to grow and cultivate company interest from areas in technology and manufacturing that builds products that build services that we export to the world from greater phoenix so what you see on slide four here just further clarifies that the kind of year that we had so we have an annual contract goal as you can see in the second column which is induced payroll average high wage salary which you can see at the minimum of 61 000 per contract the number of jobs that we support in the creation of as well as a percentage of those being high-wage jobs and then qualified prospects so one one exciting facet again if many of you know i've been at gpec for this is year 14.
we're now generating uh 40 percent of our deal flow comes from our marketing automation data science work in our direct outreach so whereas the remaining balance comes from our engagement with national consulting teams like cb richard ellis or jll or others and about 10 percent comes from our state partners and the rest are communities and other lead sources so what i've prided uh gpec on is that we are generating a lot of new opportunities uh with the uh really prescribed business plan that we deploy so if you look at the second uh i guess the third column to your right there you will see our actual results we broke records in many areas including total payroll this last year as well as total job counts for the first time exceeding 10 500 net new phase 1 jobs and almost 5 000 phase 1 high wage jobs so again overall very strong position as you can see where we look uh or read pale in comparison if you look at previous years we've had you know pretty strong outcomes as it relates to our core work some of these uh branded highlights again i'm not going to go through the 50 new companies but these are a representation of what we saw land across the valley and in virtually every district that we represent here had pretty significant outcomes from blue origin jeff bezos's company to gulfstream going out to mesa stryker sendoso funko many new entrances and core power one specifically core power you've probably read they have a lithium-ion uh battery ecosystem that they're building in buckeye uh lindsay their ceo will be joining gpex board this next year so that's indicative of when we're able to bring new companies to market driving new capital investment and then getting the the corporate leaders engaged in the community to help drive our business model is really how you know this continues to be a reoccurring success if you look at the next slide you will see the distribution of where these projects have gone and it's a pretty nice balance across the region i know i've talked to many of you in the past about uh working closely with our cities across the valley to ensure that they're pre they're prepared for these new companies evaluating the market that's everything from modern infrastructure to commerce park planning to entitlements to zoning and i do feel like we're in a position now on the jobs equity side you're seeing the balance of these projects not just go to phoenix and scottsdale and tempe which 20 years ago that was very commonplace today they're really spread across the valley and so are the jobs the types of jobs the the certainly the wages associated with these jobs so i've really worked with the cities in the last few years to ensure that we're building uh in zoning product to be readily available for the types of users that we're currently working with mr chairman supervisor sellers yeah progress i think everyone knows that you know part of the reason that tsmc is locating where they are is because of the loop 303 and i know you like i have heard from them that they're very concerned about prop 400e not not being accomplished soon because the interchanges right now don't support the work they're planning to do in that region can you talk a little bit about how you help us to sell these projects with the economic data that you you develop at gpac yes thank you supervisor sellers and certainly tsmc is is the one of the most significant boons of investment occurring in the united states today and uh their plan up in north phoenix where they've publicly announced the first phase there's subsequent phases that are planned which will drive a massive shift in the u.s ecosystem around semiconductors in addition to what we're seeing in the southeast valley with intel all that being said the the prop 400e was a significant uh advancement through the legislative process and support of the county as well as our business leaders and what we found uh with the veto we ended up having a lot of the business leaders very upset that uh the expansion plans and whether it's arterials or it's expanding luke's loop systems or even simply access to some of the suburban markets there's pretty serious concern about our ability to continue to cultivate new investments and new commerce parks and new capital expenditures to going and to go into these commerce parks that had had bet or planned on new uh transportation infrastructure to be built so we'll be back very aggressively tim borsett and i went down to the capitol quite a few times to talk to legislators about the reality that over 90 percent of gpec's locations as you can see on this map are within a mile of major thoroughfares that were supported by the original proposition around transportation infrastructure so you you will count you'll see us being very staunch advocates to more of these transportation infrastructure plans because that's the bedrock of our success in addition to labor supply is having the requisite transportation infrastructure reducing congestion congestion but also providing access to the entire valley that i would i would argue equates to the jobs balance that we've seen more pronounced in the last five years any other questions on that okay okay i'm almost done uh so i will uh i'll finish up with a few final slides here uh on the the regional results what i wanted to do here on slide 8 is just illustrate the previous year's performance against uh where we stood or where we stood in fy 22 and you can see we've been so fortunate to have have our communities really well prepared in terms of that community infrastructure our state programs continue to be modernized to be more effective to induce inward investment and as a byproduct our results can continue to get stronger and so one of the things i pride g-peck on is that even even obviously we're a public-private partnership with uh almost 70 percent of our funding coming from the private sector today we are governed by a board of directors that really pushes our metrics and you can see these top seven metrics listed here uh continue uh we're continuing to reach for even more aggressive outcomes for our community and how that translates then to value for the counties you can see here there's an 84 to one in a net net dollar impact to the county and these are direct uh revenues that we use an implan model supported by a third party that does an independent review of our numbers and you can see those those projects that have made investments in our region against the the funding request for the county of the 685 941 dollars uh there's an absolute return for every dollar that gets provided in the organization and that's outside of the leverage that the county obtains by having almost a two to one private sector dollar match for the monies that the county puts into our organization so we don't take that lightly that you know we have great support from the 22 county and cities within our region that support our organization but i've also really want to diversify our base where we have more private resources coming into the organization and we've been able to fulfill that uh the last several years so finally uh final slide here just references our action plan and where uh our action is strategic plans into where we're going naturally around the corner we have a change coming in the ninth floor of the the governor's office and obviously the governor sets a tone for the the business and policy strategy as well as uh infrastructure strategy for our state uh what i expect is that the county and the cities working together in a regional framework is going to be increasingly important regardless of what happens in november so one of the things that i've talked to our board about is i believe gpec and our partners here in the valley need to create an ambitious long-term shared vision for what we expect and that's around securing our water future it's around diversifying our economic base further it's around inducing innovation all of these aspects go well beyond the business attraction work that we do but if you fast forward the next 20 years if we're not building the workforce if we're not building the workforce of the future if we're not making these intentional investments like prop 400e my concern is the composition of the projects we see in the next 10 to 20 years changes or we set the right vision and we execute the right vision in the region and the projects like we've seen in the last decade immensely get better in terms of wages and the quality of the companies so that is something again i'm committing to on on behalf of the leadership of gpec and at the same time making sure we're executing our business plan uh you know with an extreme degree of focus around emerging markets we were talking about semiconductors for the last 10 years but no one expected the super cycle that occurred and fortunately today maricopa county and the greater phoenix region are recognized as one of the top three markets in the u.s around semiconductors so our our international brand is tied to our success in that vein whether it's out of taiwan western europe or other asian markets so all that being said we're going to continue to be you know the county's champion partner on representing the interest of this county and uh you know we just feel so fortunate we've had the ability to do so for so many years and we look forward to many more together so with that mr chairman i'll pause and answer any questions great well thank you very much for that presentation chris you know uh supervisor sellers and i both serve on the board for gpec and uh just congratulate you on your success your leadership of this organization appreciate the shout out to tsmc which is located in my district um but uh did want to open it up and see any if any of my colleagues had questions or comments supervisor gallardo mr uh mr mr chairman great presentation chris appreciate it congratulations on on the success maricopa county's booming it's no secret we have a number of folks that are moving in constantly transportation is key i couldn't agree with agree with you more we need to do what we can to really be able to have the transportation system within the county but there's one thing that really wasn't even discussed and it's probably the number one issue i face as a supervisor and i would imagine my my four colleagues face it and that's the issue of housing number one issue if i get any calls it's about housing you know you have a number of families that are relocating to arizona because of the job market because of the opportunities because of school a whole number of reasons but it is trying to find a place for their families to live and any thoughts on on where we're going i mean if you want companies to come to maricopa county it's it is quality of life it's transportation it's all the good things that families want to see but if there's nowhere to lay down your head they ain't coming yeah yeah supervisor garda what i would say about housing is for so many years and many of us that have been here for for a number of years have always had that be a selling point for the region it's a lower cost generally a lower cost alternative to many other places that people are coming from for the first time we're inching up in terms of appreciation the last 24 months is i'm sure you'll hear from jim rounds and he'll give you more even more color on this but the appreciation levels that we experience are unprecedented for our market that the challenge that i foresee in the near term and we've talked a lot about this with our economic imperatives work is that going forward we're going to have to figure out a supply demand balance because right now we're under supplying the market exponentially and and do i believe there can be some intervention with uh you know some of the work that tom simplot and many others are doing at the state level uh to induce the capital stack to drive more affordable housing i do think that's possible but at the same time i do think that the lack of supply has really driven appreciation that we're seeing across the valley in all areas it's not just one or two of the submarkets it's across the valley so we've been in many conversations i don't think that there's an easy solution there's not an immediate policy fix because we are relying on some federal policy we're relying on some state resources but at the same time as i talked to our cities recently when you look at the supply demand imbalance of net people moving here or even rental rates we have a challenge ahead of us that's not going to be an easy fix and so i think it's going to be incumbent upon the business leadership as we've had conversations with tsmc and many others about as they bring in new employees from around the world to greater phoenix we need to ensure we're helping cities understand the importance of building stock and i can tell you you know i'll say it out loud is the the challenge against nimbyism or not wanting new product being built this is not an arizona challenge this is a national phenomenon where people don't want to see new builds and i'm not just talking about you know um luxury apartments we're talking about you know all to all forms of housing and so some of the numbers that we've looked at you know with now i think it was last number i saw where there was 11 000 homes on the mls and that's that's up 50 uh from two months ago you know we need to see 30 to 40 000 for that to be to feel like a normalized market so to me we have to figure out the supply side of this in in a big way and i and just real quickly mr chairman just uh just a kind more of a comment i can tell you i've served on on on school boards for 20 years on elementary and now high school and so on and for the first time over the last year or so or last two years school districts are having that discussion they can't get teachers teachers have nowhere to live i mean it's it's all you know how do they recruit new teachers and and and they're now having to talk about housing how do we house our teachers and it's not just you know one or two it's the big school district it's mesa unified it's chandler unified it's scottsdale it's phoenix it's peoria all these big school districts that have thousands of kids and how do we educate them how do we recruit teachers how do we retain teachers now they're saying okay now how do we build apartments how do we i mean school districts are having this discussion so this is a a discussion that really has to be on the forefront on all levels of government how do we address the housing crisis uh in maricopa county and the state of arizona and you're right it's i'm not saying it's just uh it's across the board it's everywhere i get it but for the first time i was just shocked i'm sitting there at a school board meeting outside cannot believe as a on a school board at all the years i've been on a school board never having to talk about housing school districts are stepping and saying if we don't address a housing issue from a school district level for our own employees certified classified school districts ain't going to stay open you're not and supervisor gallardo to your point i give chris credit because you recently had a gpac board meeting where we had mike leeb well-known developer here in the valley and you know that gpec board is filled with mayors and he was very direct so i thought it was a great discussion i encourage it we need to be honest about this and thank you for providing a forum you know that's sort of an added benefit of gpac obviously we've got all these you know new locates but it's one of the few you know organizations where you do get folks from around the region together and it leads to further collaboration so i want to acknowledge your the important part that you play in that as well any other comments questions supervisor galvin mr chairman thank you mr camacho thank you so much i want to congratulate you and your team for the great job you've been doing especially you over the last 14 years indeed you guys have been a great partner with the county and with the state and serving arizona you know you talk about partnership the partnership's a two-way street and for me government has to do more in terms of doing more to help facilitate these headwinds that we're going to be facing over the next five seven ten years one way that i see from my political philosophy is that government's role is to do no harm right to do as least as harm as possible you guys the business community have done a terrific job of recruiting and bringing businesses like tsmc and other companies lesser known but just as important to the area but i fear that politicians in the state are concentrating or worried about issues that don't matter as much or they're kind of sideshows when you talk about water when mr gyarado talks about housing i think about workforce development investment in education these are the things that keep us up at night and these are the things that we're concerned about but there's only so much we can do from this perspective but we do have this platform to let you know that we support you in the business community but when we talk about 400 e i think it's a shame that maricopa county is the only county in arizona that has to face this dilemma in which it has to ask for permission for something like 400e which to me is a no-brainer that should be on the ballot and at least allow the voters to decide so i hope and i wish you good luck and we're going to work and support you on making sure that that gets brought back and then in terms of water you know this is something that is attracting national news people know that arizona and western states are facing an issue with water it takes real serious people it takes people that are willing to sit down at a table not point fingers at each other we're all in this together we're all arizonans we're gonna have to figure this out and in terms of housing absolutely gotta figure out ways to have more diverse housing stock build vertical if you can in urban areas allow people to realize that they moved here five or seven years ago someone opposed their housing project in a subdivision that they now enjoy and live in we should be good neighbors and we should be welcoming people with open arms but that's going to take leadership once again from the government side but i just want to congratulate the business community for doing everything that it can and to make sure that government does no harm going forward thank you thank you supervisor galvin for chair hickman for brevity's sake i might i could have made those same comments that all of you have made especially you um tom that there's so many issues facing this state but also maricopa county and i i think i heard you chris say you're going to lean into those relationships at the city and the county level i i really think you need to lean into those relationships with this new legislature these new representatives this new governor um you guys did work on proposition 400 and it got all the way to the point of a governor's veto that's been here for eight years and has seen these problems so i i'm not going to cast aspersions or anything on on what that decision was but that did represent a lot of work to get to the point where the where the voter could make a decision on which way they go and it's it's a travesty that the county that this county that has these companies international companies as well as uh national companies coming here and seeking to create just an economic juggernaut that maricopa county or this state could represent and to hear some of this stuff get stifled by people that are not willing to take 10 minutes of the day to even look into it it's it's a little bit it's a little bit difficult serving on this board for this many years so i hope i wish you guys the best hope the best however we can help yeah thank you mr supervisor and i can tell you uh as i said in the beginning our work is going to be cut out for us we've had a great run from an economic growth perspective but what's ahead's going to feel very different and so i think it's how the bond of the region which is 73 percent of the state's economy is going to be absolutely imperative for us to move the ball forward and dealing with some tough issues tough investment issues and my belief is that if we take that seriously we get the business community engaged uh working with our elected officials here at the regional level we'll be able to push the state i hope in a direction that will have a consequence of outcome and absent that i mean if you study markets for a living like i do markets are either moving forward and advancing and prospering or they're in a first stage of decline and so that's how i talk to our board about our current economic position there's still many more benefits to reap from our economic strategy but we have to be making these intentional investments balanced with the modernized tax system and all the other facets that make us competitive so i look forward to working with all of you on them okay anything further again chris thanks for the presentation tim sounds like your dance card's gonna be full uh all right thank you so much i appreciate it okay moving right along here uh we we've talked about how things have been going now we're going to talk a little bit about how we think they're going to be going with the economy and no better person to talk to in the state of arizona on that topic than jim rounds uh jim great to see you thank you for putting this presentation together and uh looking forward to your words uh mr chairman uh supervisors great to see you um and let's hope that it's how we think where things are going but with a highly educated guess with at least some degree of certainty um we know that's not going to completely be the case that's why we always say be cautious with the downturn but the thing that's different this time is that there's a pretty clear story whenever we've talked to you before when things are declining you end up with a little bit of a disconnected story you see some good data points some bad that's why we have this debate and that's why i've had actually some members of congress get mad at me because i said we're not in a recession yet and here's why um well for political reasons some people want us to be in a recession uh however if we're in a recession and it started last january that means that we'd be coming out of it this next month which i don't think anybody's expecting the economy to be getting better this next month it's going to be sliding some so the politics has been invading the economic discussion a little bit uh we don't let that happen because we're feisty enough and independent enough so we have a little more flexibility on the i want to comment real quick and i'll go through the economic presentation quickly uh let's start with the public policy topics because you were covering some of these things i was going to cover some of these at the end instead the the items that worry me um on prop 400 the the best advice i can give on that and we were anticipating this we were having discussions of this when there's political opposition that's very vocal you need to put together arguments that will neutralize that political opposition the economic analysis on prop 400 was very very weak it didn't demonstrate the huge economic losses that would be realized if we didn't expand it it didn't talk about the gains it didn't talk about the subsets i was shocked that something like that wasn't part of it i've been told by some colleagues that there's going to be somebody coming in i think an out-of-state firm that specializes in transportation funding that'll try to put together some of that but one of the things that you can encourage much like you manage the county is to make sure that there's some economic discussion and you talk about how it's going to benefit you have to tell a story or you're not going to get voters interested in attacks but if you tell the right story especially one like 400 that would have a very positive roi you can win people over and that roi discussion doesn't get influenced by political issues it's not a democrat issue or republican issue it's a how can we manage this best for uh the the voters the residents and so that's pretty straightforward the second one housing prices i i completely agree that's the one that worries me the most um we're on a couple of different groups uh we're doing some work for the league of cities we're doing some work for department of housing and well we may be doing some work for a couple of other groups that are going to look at some niche areas but my bigger concern is a lot of this isn't the city's fault or local governments well a lot of it has to do with um and i'll go through you know what the fed and the low interest rates and the low mortgage rates and the investors things like that there's a lot going on as complicated but there are some things that the cities can be doing but the key is if we don't do something there's going to be economic losses so what we're going to try to do is bring that economic development discussion into housing i want to like one statistic i was looking at a chart and it showed the extent that rents went up average rents well people usually just leave it at that just yesterday i had my crew calculate what's the extra income that that household would need in order to cover that rent increase it was about ten thousand dollars that means that they would have to have a whole other level of educational attainment just to afford that when you put it in that context it's a lot different we're talking about huge scale items but there's also limits on what we can do we can't just increase the low housing tax credit program that's going to impact a very small number of people we have to have a lot of different initiatives and then ideas that you all have and how you can influence it and with our friends at gpac and others i'm optimistic that we'll at least come up with some ideas but we'll be wasting our time if we don't translate it into legislative action or people agreeing to do something if we just complain about stuff nothing formally will get done so we have to actually have an end goal of something getting implemented two more real quick i agree we have to expand the higher wage industries we have to be looking at some subsets as well for the first time and i have a slide on this our per capita personal income slide that i've been complaining about for years that's been decaying in the greater phoenix area so maricopa county it started to tick up because of everything that's been done on the economic development side the last few years the question is is it going to keep moving up or is it going to stall well things that we haven't talked about before whenever i listed the economic development items that impact how we grow i used to not list water now it's on there i didn't list housing prices now it's on there infrastructure concerns there's a lot so we have to look at this from a more holistic standpoint but it's hard to communicate that because it's so complex people typically don't fully understand it but if you break it down into the individual bits that different groups might understand so some housing specialized groups give them all this good information and let them make some good points and have them be the wingman of another group that's working on higher wage individuals to help get that per capita personal income up so we can get more tax revenue to invest in workforce training programs at the universities and apprenticeship programs things like that so we have a higher roi so the fact that the economy is so complicated makes it really difficult to implement stuff but i think you all know how the economy works probably better than any other board that i've worked with and i think that there could be some opportunities for some partnerships you don't always have to lead you don't always have to fund something but sometimes you could back somebody up uh workforce actually i think this is this is just as big as housing when whenever there's budget issues and this is more at the state level than at the county level when there's budget issues if you remember after the great recession the state had to go through and do a lot of gimmicks just to make the budget work selling buildings all sorts of stuff borrowing right now we've had such strong economic development growth we've been doing that with our workforce we have these big companies coming in and we're having to pay huge incentives to have them send our people out of state and out of the country to get trained that is fine for now because this came up on us quickly this isn't sustainable longer term it's not economically efficient we have to be on top of this we have to get rid of some of the myths like we are producing too many bachelor's degrees when we're actually under producing by about 50 percent we have to get through the myth that no we just have to focus on trade schools no the bachelor degree jobs help create demand for the trade schools but so does the business recruitment because you have some of those as a indirect employment as a suppliers so again it's complicated but those are the main items that i see and these are the items that i think you all have talked about over the years you know you met mr guyarder you were talking about housing and i can tell this has always been a major issue or major you know point where you've been passionate about let's bring some of that in but we have to monetize it what i found at least at the state capital if we want to get stuff done is you have to do the complex math you have to tell the story you have to treat each of these issues like a campaign we're not just looking for some affordable housing ideas we need to run a little campaign on how we can get to that goal much like we have a campaign for 400 that probably will be really solid this next time around uh so that's my little bit on what we were just talking about hopefully that gives some context and if feel free to interrupt me if you want to ask any questions before i right oh i'm sorry jim supervisor sellers now jim i think you know i'm the chair of the mag transportation policy committee so we're going to be very focused uh on what kind of message do we need to really not allow this to happen again and and and you know certainly as we went through the veto letter it showed that we did a poor job of communicating what this was about you know the letter doesn't understand that even for something like us being able to participate in the bipartisan infrastructure funding that's going to be available for five years that we need to have a funding pla funding plan in place that demonstrates that we have projects that are going to be funded and so we need to have that approved as quickly as possible and uh so our focus is really going to be on what what messages do we really need and what did we fail to do the last time around mr chairman mr sellers um let's get together sometime and i'll just give you a list of all the different things that i think could be helpful this next time around if uh the the consultant that's coming in wants to brainstorm a little bit happy to spend some time with them and give them some advice and i'm certain you'll be able to get this through the next time but it was lacking in some areas i wasn't surprised it was vetoed at all well and my concern is can we really afford to wait until 2024 to make something happen good point no others all right let's cover the fun economic stuff uh okay uh are we in a recession i i was told that this would be something uh that we needed to cover because like i mentioned earlier it gives you some context on whether or not the pain's in front of us or it's behind us we have had declines in gdp in the past where we didn't have recessions but keep in mind two consecutive quarters of declining gdp hasn't been used as a definition for a recession in about 30 years that's just a very simple rule of thumb like when somebody talks about the stock market they'll bring up the dow that's not the best measure of where the stock market is but that's what people think about so you have to look at and you have to tell the story behind it and we had some interesting things going on with trade imbalances we had some interesting things going on with inventories and the decline was pretty small and it's an unusual expansion but when you define a recession you have to look at other things like job growth you have to look at income growth you have to look at other things and it can't just be weak a recession isn't this huge four-year period where the economy might be slowing past a peak it's where it's contracting so this is a shorter version of the gdp numbers where you can see that they're negative but we've added i think it's about 3.2 million jobs from january through july does that sound like a recession no that's a big number of jobs that were added the u.s caught up to those lost jobs during covet so it's not just that issue of adding advanced jobs because um we have that big fall so you fall by 50 you got to go by 100 to get back to where you were before that's where we were last year so this is telling me that we're not in a recession but i i think that we need to get away from that definition it's it's easy for people to think about like when it when it's political well we're in a recession my colleagues have been doing poorly elect us instead it doesn't matter it's the economy is still weakening you all are going to have to be a little bit more careful with revenue we're probably going to have a recession in 2023 and what is it going to look like for you how do you manage the budget to what extent you want to reduce risk if you want to lower your risk you lower your right your forecast so the forecast actually includes policy decisions to some extent because if you all wanted to be highly optimistic and you wanted to maybe a 50 50 chance of hitting the forecast that's different than saying i want to be 90 certain or i only want to be 25 certain and that's why we put together different forecasts for you um in i'm sorry inflation ramping up quite a bit producer price index so the cost on businesses has been going up this is going to start to peak but it's not necessarily a good thing this isn't the leading indicator this is happening because of some policy decisions and unfortunately it's happening because of some corrections that we've had to make recently because of some bad policy decisions from about a handful of years ago or not that far but at the beginning of covid yield curve this is one of those it's a comparison of whether or not it costs more to borrow short term versus longer term when this goes negative it usually indicates that we're going to have a recession shortly this is one of the reasons one of many though we look at tons of different data points as you know this is one of the reasons i think 2023 is a recession point federal funds rate effective rate moving up they won't have to keep raising it to the extent that they were if inflation gets under control we're seeing reductions in gas prices but it's still well above where we were before one thing that people don't talk about though when we talk about inflation is effective inflation for different demographic groups or economic groups like for example i had a fixed mortgage uh during uh some of these uh housing price increases and some of the problems it didn't impact me at all had no impact at all some people are paying more for gas but a lot of people are driving half the miles so there's different i'm not saying that it's good but there's different ways of looking at it we have to dissect these numbers because the coveted recession really hit lower income people the next recession is going to be a little bit more white-collar-ish because there's such a shortage of those jobs at the lower income level that we're not going to see the job losses we're going to see more at that middle level but not a lot it's going to be a mild recession more like 2020 or 2001.
so what's the story this is the the reason i feel good about explaining what's hap what happened and what's going to happen is it makes sense so covet hit the economy and i feel that the u.s government overreacted with some of the stimulus plans now i'm all for and i even tweeted about it this morning that i love it when the federal government spends extra money and it comes back to arizona but it's still my money and then i had to correct myself and say no this is my kid's money because we borrowed for it so the fact that the sex these extra monies are coming to arizona is great but we need to start thinking about balancing the budget at the federal level that used to be an issue that people talked about now it hasn't been uh discussed nearly as much but anyways the federal government overreacted they didn't understand the nature of the downturn how the how uh the length that it was going to be the depth the income groups that were impacted the stimulus plans were all over the place we ended up stimulating sending stimulus monies to individuals that really weren't suffering during the downturn so it was just a lot of inefficient spending so we put a bunch of money into the economy and as i'm talking about this if any of you studied or nobody remembers it but if anybody studied the volcker recession this is almost a replay what happened then was in the 60s you had in 70s you had a lot of social change you had a lot of increase in spending and social programs government increases spending things got a little bit out of balance a federal reserve board kept interest rates too low for too long inflation crept up because of external forces and internal uh decision making same thing is happening right now and then they had to raise interest rates to the point where they stalled the economy send it into a recession and then we hit the reset button does that not sound like what we're dealing with right now now what that what that means though is that if we have a mild recession i think that we're going to come out of it and we'll be in good shape we have to hit this reset button people can't afford to keep paying what they're paying the increase in cost when their incomes aren't going up as much for as long so i think what i what i've seen over the last two or three years is when we talk about the economy it's not just high-level white-collar jobs that we are thinking about you know as economists you got to think about who's being impacted lower-income individuals when you talk about workforce training and education attainment which is part of what generates your revenue that you spend we need to maybe get more people at lower income levels advancing to a college and and beyond and getting a high school degree and then keep going we've done the math on these things and i'll send you all a link to our report that we did for the business community including gpec and it monetizes what happens if we just catch up to the u.s average so our bumper sticker is stride to become average really if we do it generates billions of dollars in extra tax revenue that could be reinvested to get to those statistics that's how we do the math that's how we justify the different programs you have to look at these rois that's how i evaluate things on my business i don't spend a dollar a profit to increase a dollar of revenue i spend a dollar a profit to generate a dollar and a penny or more in profit we have to think in those terms so you can't run government like a business but you got to bring in these principles a little bit more so the recession was short-lived federal reserve made money very cheap and very easy to get um they affect interest rates but it also affects the extent that they put money into the economy and they pull money out of the economy so we had a lot of money shoved into the economy it was really easy to get and that combined with the supply chain issues from kovid created this horrible imbalance in terms of what people could buy and what they wanted to buy and what they could buy inflation heated up we had a russian ukraine issue uh the fed should have started raising interest rates at the beginning of last year in fact i even had to look back to see when the first time we recommended that they start increasing that and it was january of last year we knew that the recession was going to be short some people don't even call it a recession because it really had to do with something a little bit different but i i still call it a recession because the basic numbers and it's you don't want to confuse people by making it too messy but we ended up having all this money and it was too easy to access which allowed individuals that really weren't impacted during the downturn to go buy a more expensive home now if you uh uh what was it if you go from three percent to five and a half percent i think that translated into about a hundred thousand dollar increase or 150 000 increase in the value of home you could buy and it doesn't affect your finances so we ended up making money so cheap that helped drive up the price of homes we have a lot of um additional home housing that's being built for uh uh investors are bringing it in and running and we also have uh the um short-term rentals uh you know for vacations now i don't have a problem with that at all but what i think is that if the governments are having the government entities are having to shift some of their current fixed budget to process and get some homes developed that aren't necessarily going into the workforce supply then it's taking away resources that would be processing the number of homes to get the workforce homes so if we've had this increase we need to see an increase at the city level in some cases and ramp up the ability to accommodate these requests so again this isn't a city blaming issue there are some things that the cities can do better but there's a lot of stuff going on there's probably a dozen major issues that we'll end up listening in our report for the league on why prices have gone up but we're going to try to do it where we identify a dollar amount so people can picture it in their head rather than keeping it very broad so again volker recession by 2023 not the same scale of job losses it's going to be a much more mild so the forecast that we submitted to you but you'll want to decide for yourselves what you end up budgeting over the next couple of years is for the more mild downturn and we feel pretty good about that argument because everything in the story is telling us that that's the case the economy is just so out of balance with the supply and demand for jobs and everything else it's not going to look like a normal recession if we don't see as many job losses you're not going to see the impact on individual families incomes going down it's going to be quite different the only thing that could be different is that instead of it being maybe seven or eight months it might end up being a year but we'll just have to wait and see at that point we're guessing there's just no way of knowing for sure if something oh downturns can be seven months nine months or eleven months given this economic cycle all right so this matters because all of this extra activity that we've seen because of all this extra money in the market has been allowing individuals to access that those resources and spend it which is pumping up revenues at the government level we did a calculation on at the state level before where we figured there was about a half a billion minimum in the current budget that is transitory and that was a very conservative number which means over three years that's a billion and a half it could be even more and for some context to get through a downturn if you don't for at the state if you don't want to cut budgets if you don't want to reduce services you want to kind of keep everything status quo it'll cost you about two and a half billion dollars to get through a mild recession well if we don't have quite that amount of money um in terms of what's the ongoing revenue coming in we end up having to somehow absorb let's say we do cut some programs and things like that but we have to absorb a billion and a half and we have about a billion in the rainy day fund that means they're going to be looking for some extra money if they're not careful with how they spend it this coming year but at the same time this is a great time to spend some of these stimulus monies that are still out there in grants and i'm hoping we can continue to invest in things like workforce and other things going forward to keep those revenues up this truly is like how you invest in a business you have to put money into these things this isn't a liberal issue of saying i want to put money into certain education programs this is a business issue of i want to put money into these five education programs because we evaluated 20 and we decided that these were the highest roi for political reasons we shifted two from numbers six and seven into four and five and we queued them and we handed them to the next governor that's coming in and the appropriations chairs in the house and the senate that's how we have to be thinking about these things this is how we'll be brainstorming with our friend chris at gpec and others to find out what items they might be pushing for so we're just a small consulting firm but we have the ear of some people but if a bunch of individuals pursue these things and do it the right way i think we can continue to make the county much much better and we'll have one of the best expansions ever after we get through this next downturn but we have to keep investing or we're going to run into these some of these problems that we talked about let me catch up a little bit because i was ranting this is just some perspective on the extent that this downturn compared to the great recession great recession those are the dash lines arizona did far worse this time around we recovered the jobs and then some the u.s just recovered the jobs but people are expecting this to look a little bit more like the great recession where it was going to go on for multiple years and that's why we had that overreaction by the federal government in my opinion on the extra spending and the overly aggressive federal reserve board here's some backup on showing where uh the recession hit it was really in the lower income individuals most groups have almost have fully recovered or are about to be there but lower income impact this next time around i think it's going to be that middle group i think it's going to be maybe the uh what is that 60 to 100 somewhere in that range i think we're going to see a little bit more of a dip there but i don't think we're going to see a huge dip on the lower income individuals as long as there's employment opportunities that are robust when times are tough people have to make decisions a lot of people during this downturn realize i really like spending time with my family i don't need two cars we do half of our meetings on zoom anyways so let's go ahead and get by well that's that extra pool of people we can tap into that will fill some of these uh um open uh openings in the different businesses as soon as wages get to the point where they feel good about going in but we have to be careful because you want wages to be high because of productivity increases you don't want them to be high because of some weird imbalances that's that doesn't help people so i'm hoping that we can get back to that productivity and that gets back to educational attainment it gets back to all the other things that i know you are focused on for some historical perspective job growth in 2020 we are number five we fell to 15 and 2022 were 18.
this makes it look like our economy has been weakening but what part of chris's presentation or my presentation has indicated that things are really getting much much worse right now or that we've been in a recession what's happening on this is some fourth grade math we ended up recovering the lost jobs very quickly so early on we posted very high rates of growth because again you fall by 50 you grow by 100 to get back to where you were before so the rates of growth end up being very high during something dramatic like the covet downturn a lot of states were stagnant for a while now all of a sudden they're recovering things way after us they're not doing as well but they're going from such a low base all of a sudden they're posting rates of growth that are higher than us so you have to look at the level of recovery if you just look at these rankings and i put these in because these are the most popular ones like i mentioned with the dow or whatever it looks like we're slipping we're not though let me see hawaii the economy is a mess nevada has a lot of problems they're late to the game which is why they're posting high rates of growth uh pennsylvania north carolina why would north carolina be above us in terms of growth michigan illinois tennessee these aren't places where people are just uh getting super excited about locating their businesses or moving there or going on vacation these are places that are just now recovering so if you see these statistics and people do some comparisons it's because we already enjoyed that rate and we're at a higher level we're still producing more we're creating more jobs but our level is higher even though their rate of growth is higher they're just catching up let me skip through a couple more uh historically as you know we've always done better than the us uh in times of expansion and recession i think that it's going to be even more dramatic this time around except for the great recession and that was very unique that really impacted us being so dependent on growth and we have diversified but it takes a while to diversify no matter what you do on the economic development side or everybody that works on economic development in the state remember if you create a hundred thousand dollar your job you're also creating a fifty thousand dollar your job and a forty five thousand dollar your job you're creating that job at mcdonald's and you're creating the supplier um so [Music] when you average them out it's a little bit more difficult to change things all of a sudden you have to be working at this level so all the compliments that you threw toward to gpec absolutely deserved they need to keep that level of production up for the next decade for us to really enjoy the economic benefits of all the things that we'd like to see including that increase in the per capita personal income and here's that slide so you want to scale it you sometimes you got to compare yourself to yourself if you compare it to others there might be differences if you compare yourself to yourself i liken it more like golf where if i play with somebody that's better than me um it doesn't matter you know that's great it's taking less time if they're not you know out trying to find their ball uh but i'm still hitting it awkwardly i'm playing against myself though if i play with somebody that's worse i'm still playing against myself so in this case this is my favorite uh measure because it shows the scale that we're keeping up on an adjusted basis and looking at the things that really matter and look at that uptick if we can get that up another five or ten percent if we can approach 100 that's going to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in extra revenue for the county and we're talking about maybe a billion or more each year at the state level just getting back to where we should be so we have reason to be optimistic and there's a reason and it backs up why you all want to work on economic development items you want to work on building the economy and not just simply being managers of the current budget and looking at basic accounting issues there's a lot that you have to look at and and i i'm excited for the fact that you continue to look at this at the at a high level i don't have these discussions with that many boards to be honest so this is fun we do need to invest in a new clicker let's say you know what i've gone on for a while let me let me end it there so in terms of the forecast we have the revenues in terms of the forecast we have the revenues only sliding a bit you have that in your packets on what um the budget team submitted to you we had great brainstorming sessions with them like we always do talking about what are your concerns what kind of budget issues might be coming up how how at risk is our forecast that we submit that's maybe most likely versus a conservative or a recession but you'll see that we don't have the revenues especially when you look at sales dropping through the floor it's moderating it's going down a little bit and then it'll catch back up to the trend within a couple of years even though it'll just be a recession in 2023.
Now that means that it's probably going to cross two fiscal years which actually makes it it in the data it'll show that it's not as as severe when because you look at things on a fiscal year basis when you look at charts but it's still the same impact it's just going to be massed a little bit by the fact that you're only going to see part of it in one fiscal year and part in the next but after that i think there's going to be really strong growth but the great thing with budgeting is you have to be prepared for the downturn you don't have to be budgeting for the expansion that i think is going to be very very strong for a little bit longer and so there'll be time to figure out what those extra opportunities uh are going to present themselves and what do you have to do to get through the downturn now and again unlike prior years or prior decades i think public policy has a bigger impact on the economy than it ever has because we've been growing we're more dynamic and the extent that you could be supporting these programs and again it doesn't have to be we're providing an appropriation for something it can just be jack you know working on the transportation issues and lending you know your support and expertise and being a voice for it housing issues other economic issues things that we've been talking about the tsmc that goes a long way and i encourage you to keep that up so i'll leave it at that and so it was kind of a economic update presentation a little bit of a policy update and a little bit of a rant but that makes it more fun right i i would not call that a rant at all that that was fantastic as always jim thank you so much for your keen insights and it's been extremely helpful to this board over the years you know again as i think everyone up here has really been focused on you know making those decisions that have put the county taxpayer in good stead to not be overly aggressive and and i anticipate this group will continue to do that but at the same time we don't want to be too conservative uh because there are a lot of needs in the community and a lot of things that that we want to address so as always excellent presentation questions or comments from my colleagues just one advice your gallardo just one mr chairman and so been down there at the capitol and and i knew you know i don't i probably should focus a little bit more on what they do down there into the street but i try not to but i should um i knew they were in budget fights and and and even when i was there you know you always had a 9 10 billion dollar budget or so and um so i knew i knew they were flush with cash i knew they had extra money and that was why i felt that you know a little infighting there at the capitol and then when they passed their budget i i look at the the the tweet from some of the news outlet and it's like legislature agrees on an 18 billion dollar budget i was like 18.
where'd all the money go like really what i mean where did they where did they put the money 18 billion and it got me thinking and not on the county i mean cities school districts estate got a lot of support from the federal government you talked about it but there's going to be a time where that federal money is gone and we're back to reality it's not an 18 billion dollar budget have you thought or have started looking at what the economy looks like post covid when all that federal money is spent and gone and out the window and we're back to reality and you're not i mean this is coming from a democrat like i probably shouldn't be telling this but i'm saying it i mean even i the democrat said wow i mean what is the world going to look like what's the state going to look like what are school districts the county the city is going to look like when that federal dollars are gone and we're back to reality and what we're having to deal with from a from an economic side any thoughts of postcovid yeah and so when we were talking with your staff about the calculations that we did for the state we last i think it was this last year we also produced one for the county and i came up with a dollar amount that you know those dollar amounts could be at risk but here's my thoughts on whether or not we're going to hit a cliff i don't think washington is managed at the level that's needed for them to be thinking about this stuff long term which means i think they're going to continue to overspend well into the rest of the decade i guess it it doesn't matter if you're republican or democrat these days both are going to be you know spending like crazy and so if that's the case then we're hitting this wall with this kind of free money being available that causes the recession so the recession and the money being taken away and then all the spending up to this point is part of it but the nature of the money coming out of dc is a little different before it was here's a dollar here's a dollar whether you need it or not i know businesses that were doing quite well that were bragging about getting three million dollars four million dollars in stimulus monies and it was ridiculous it i i was shocked how inefficient the programs were but if if we get to a point where they don't cut back on the federal spending but the spending is in areas like the transportation monies longer term we're going to get benefits from that so we're going from inefficient use of stimulus monies to more efficient use but we still have to pay the price actually for both but if we keep kicking the can down the road on our debt which i know that they're going to then we don't hit that wall um eventually we'll have to fix that issue or we're going to have to become hyper productive and really invest in all these high roi programs at the federal level as well i think arizona should be in areas like environmental tech development and some of these health tech projects that you hear about from universities and the private sector and all this other stuff these things are what's going to help drive arizona so we have the u.s a little bit more at risk we have dc the forecast the footnote says they're continuing going to continue to be incompetent for the most part not really but that's how i look at it and then we have arizona is going to do quite a bit better because we are so different now than we were in 2008 when we went through that recession so i i'm worried too but i have a feeling they're going to be bad enough at their jobs they're not going to cut the spigot off right away good question though vice chair hickman yeah jim thanks i always always a pleasure hearing from you and hope that other government entities get the chance to to hear from you as well that um uh here very shortly i just wanted to see if you could uh change or what does it take to get in this bullet point what is the story russia ukraine further drove up fuel prices it's driving up food prices too yeah ukraine is is the bread basket of of europe and as you see corn and soy meal and wheat cut off maybe we don't fill it exactly here in america but they do in africa they do in the european continent and we will start possibly outsourcing even more food to those continents um so i hope you put that down there too because quite often when you hear about the water issues ag doesn't look like it's in a good light we're an exporter of our water through products well those products get eaten uh here as well and during the you know the pandemic a lot of people saying i'm glad we produce food here for the local economy i'm glad that it's on the shelves in my case eggs didn't get off the shelf people overbought them because they were afraid they were but milk was starting to get poured down drains because they didn't have a logistics worked out i hope they're still working on that but our legislators need to hear food and fuel because a household budget you need gas to get to work you need to work for your for your wages to pay a food bill so hopefully you'll you'll you'll change that bullet point a little bit uh mr chairman mr eric i like that idea a lot in fact you know a good way of showing this and maybe i'll put this together and send you uh the slides separately but i think for some other stuff that we're doing i want to do a breakdown of a household budget at different levels like maybe 50 100 150.
Break down the different areas where they spend money but do uh what did it what does it look like now what does it look like five years ago what does it look like 10 years ago and 15 years ago and take a look at that and you can see how certain areas like the extra spending on gas and rent and food is squeezing other things and when you squeeze the other things it means you don't have as much to spend usually to keep your kids healthy or to get them a tutor on you know to help them with their education incomes income problems actually impact health care and educational attainment quite a bit and so these are nuances where usually it was considered a democrat issue so mr gallardo would be going around ranting about this stuff and it's like that's a left issue that's an economic development issue now so i that's a i like your point a lot i think that would be a cool slide though to show the full breakdown and then show the pain the increases in all these different areas yeah i'll send that your way right but to that point i'm sorry mr trump but to that point those families that are the lower income i mean they rely on other programs to help them get by they rely on school districts cities and it goes back to my point when that coveted money is gone and those programs are are now gone for the most part they're cut back what do these families on the lower end that are now they're screwed yeah that's supervisor galvan mr rounds thank you for that great presentation i could ask you questions all day i want to kind of limit it to the to the issue of housing um you know i look at these two charts you have one is per capita personal income in phoenix and then the other one is a median price of single-family homes sold and if i did like a mental overlay you can see that income is kind of flat line you talk about that tick just recently but the median price of home sold has gone straight up so while incomes has been almost stagnant with a little increase the um the increase in the price of houses has just gone exponentially and i think about um one issue about private equity companies from around the country that i'm investing in houses here which in many ways i'm not sure exactly the story's been overblown but people here locally say they can't buy a house because you know these big companies from new york or whatever are coming in and buying and then you have what what's called build to rent where they look like single-family residential homes to own but people have to rent them and at the same time a new term that i just learned this year zoom towns right phoenix is now considered a zoom town where people can move here from california or oregon where prices were more houses were more expensive they can come here go oh my gosh it's so cheap here in arizona and i can just do my job but i can do it over zoom and in fact my kid just had a back to school event and i just met parents who just literally met uh moved here a week ago from the bay area and told me that's exactly what they're doing they're going to be working from home they found a house that was very cheap here for them so do you think during the recession that people are still going to continue moving let's say from those coastal states what's going to happen with these private equity firms that have invested in real estate are they going to stick it out long term are they going to dump it and how do you think that's going to affect folks here who are interested in buying houses or worried about um you know a sharp downturn in medium prices so from both angles what do you think so on the investor side there's one of the reasons that arizona's so popular is that our property taxes are very low so we could have the same economic profile of say houston or something like that and their residential property taxes are more than double ours that makes it less profitable to be doing these types of investments so they're part of it's a configuration of our tax code but part of it's the fact that we continue to grow because we're a popular place and so we're a less risky bet now when they can get access to cheap money then they can go full bore on these types of investment projects now that things are getting more expensive we'll have to see how much money is not going to go into the stock market and might be used for other things if the economy stalls and we start to see a hit if it's going to shift but um i think that we're that's going to be the most elastic now prices aren't going to fall through the floor because unlike 2008 where we had our six and seven the recession was in 2008 we had people that really shouldn't have been buying a home getting a mortgage now we had people that could already afford a mortgage to get an even more expensive home so it's a different situation these individuals can afford it now which means prices are going to stabilize but they're not going to fall rapidly so we're going to go through a period where affordability is still going to be a problem we're going to have a negative impact from a recession which means the housing affordability issue is going to get a little bit worse next year but also keep in mind and this is good and bad this is an imbalance this can't last economics will not allow it we can either through public policy and other things try to make it where housing becomes more affordable again or we stop growing as rapidly we don't get the tsmc jobs and prices will go down naturally but our economy is in much worse condition so economics will stabilize this but how do we want it to get back into balance it's like when i describe economics i describe it as if you get a bucket and you scoop a bucket of water out of a pool you don't have a bucket size hole in the pool everything fills in this this expansion is more like jello where you scoop a bucket of jello out there's still a little dent for a little while that's kind of like this economy but eventually it's going to smooth over so what do we want it to look like and that's something that that worries me okay thank you all right well jim thank you so much for your work with the county the presentation and uh look forward to uh seeing if all your uh forecasts come to be oh they'll be spot on thanks good to see you thanks so much okay next item is we had um reference there near the end of property taxes so that was a great segue to number three item three today which is fiscal year 2023 property tax levy resolution we've had a lot of presentations on our budget discussions of the property tax as we always do over the past few months and now this is the time when uh the uh board is in a position to take official action on that so with that uh i uh uh and and just for those who haven't been following along at home uh very proud to say that we are in a position based upon uh the motion that may be made uh to make the uh this board to approve the the largest property tax cut in in memory i think of anyone around here which given the information we heard about where this economy may be heading uh it may be very timely so with that uh do we have a motion mr chairman i move that we adopt the fy 2023 property tax levy resolution as printed in the agenda which sets the fiscal year 2023 which is the tax year of 2022 primary and or secondary tax rates for maricopa county the flood control district of maricopa county maricopa county library district and the county improvement districts pursuant to the direction of each governmental entity levy the amounts of taxes and set the resulting tax rates for each is set forth and number two of the maricopa county fiscal year 2023 tax levy resolution in addition direct the treasurer to collect the taxes as detailed in number three of the agenda item i just thought about all that myself today very well said [Laughter] do we have a second mr chairman i'd like to second that with a comment yes please thank you for the second supervisor sellers yeah i just want to thank all the people i i think that very few people realize how much effort goes into doing this and so mr chairman i want to thank you and your your your chief of staff uh joy cindy all the people and all the other electeds because this is a very very extensive collaborative effort it takes a lot of work and i appreciate all that you've done so thank you thank you for those comments we have a motion in a second supervisor grayardo thank you mr chairman and um ditto to uh supervisor sellers uh comments just thank you mr chairman for the work you've done not only the budget but getting us to this point as well and all the other folks that have been involved in it couldn't be more appreciative i'm supportive of a tax cod under one condition and that is all our bills are paid we're able to make sure that every area in maricopa county is taken care of from our electeds to our county departments are we paying our bills are we are we doing what we are required to do under the constitution and we're doing what we can to help the people of maricopa county i believe we are my only concern and i just throw this out there is we got to really approach this carefully there'll be a time as i stated where the federal dollars are gone we're back to reality and do we have enough revenue coming into the county to continue the types of services we have in front of us so i'll be supportive of the motion i'm always careful i'll support a tax cut i think if we can reduce our tax levy and be able to help families and businesses and everyone that's impacted i'm fine with it but as long as our bills are paid and as long as from a long-term perspective we're able to maintain that level so um nobody likes to raise taxes nobody that's like the third rail of politics we all know that but at the same time we have a responsibility to provide services to the people of maricopa county and to our departments our elected officials um and we just have to be real careful as we move forward but i'm very supportive of the proposed motion thank you supervisor gallardo well well said and i agree completely and you know in spending all the time with cindy and her team we're in that position we're very much prepared for uh this post-covid world as it relates to stimulus and i'm also pleased that we were able as part of this budget to provide the revenues uh and the salary increases to keep all the great people on board here maricopa county supervisor galvin chairman quickly i just want to echo what jack and steve had to say completely agree absolutely and i just want to congratulate you on your leadership for for being at the at the wheel here for the county this year so thank you thank you and i want to thank all my colleagues both here on the board and and county-wide electeds uh to to getting this done uh mr chairman further just real quickly we've gone along but yes absolutely i appreciate you and your staff and cindy and everybody putting this this budget to the point where we could offer a tax cut to the residents of maricopa county so they can use the money that they make uh appropriately in their own households and also um i heard you steve eight years i've been on this board eight years we've tried to get with our legislature and talk about cost shifts and straight out sweeps and we have worked and tried diligently to work down i'm extremely afraid that if people do not come into this legislature and look at these issues like we've looked at we're going to be hurt and we do have to provide in a prudent way to the county taxpayer all sorts of services that we have to pay for and i do not like being the guy to have to hike taxes in order because somebody else decided we need to spend our money in a different way so i appreciate that and thank you bill great job this year uh getting us to this point thank you okay motion in a second all in favor please say aye aye all opposed motion passes unanimously next item four adoption of full cash value for bond calculation do we have a motion on this item make the uh mr chairman make the motion to approve item number four adoption of full cash value for bond calculation thank you do you have a second second second thank you supervisor galvin motion and a second any comment all in favor say aye aye aye all opposed motion passes unanimously okay next this brings us to the canvas of the primary election for 2022 thanks to all of you who have been in the room just before i turn it over to everyone just wanted to make a few comments first of all i want to thank the voters of maricopa county they turned out in record numbers for a primary and democracy only works when people feel like they can express themselves so i'm i'm very pleased about that secondly i want to give a thank you to the birthday boy stephen richer our recorder uh the cake is on its way i think vice chair hickman is going to sing happy birthday here soon privately we can look privately so you can look forward to that um recorder richer has been a true partner uh to those of us here on the board of supervisors and running elections he and his team ran an incredibly smooth voter registration and mail-in uh voting operation during the primary and we're thrilled with this partnership his personal partnership and the partnership of his team and i know that i speak on behalf of of my colleagues when i say to you stephen uh we really do appreciate this partnership and your hard work on this um and frankly we believe that maricopa county has never run elections as well as they're being run now so thank you for being a extremely important part of that i want to thank our co-election directors scott jarrett and ray valenzuela for your incredible work you know um when i was working on the elections operations agreement with uh adrian fontes people said there's no way you could do this no way you could have the two houses uh working together and you guys have proven that it can be done and you two are really a phenomenal team so i want to thank you both for your leadership i want to thank the elections department in general voter registration team just incredible work in any environment but particularly in this environment right now we know the challenges that are involved in being in elections and so you know thank you recorder richer for going with me around on election day talking to all the people down there it's just amazing the work that everyone does and and i'm so grateful to them the transparency was something that was really important that this be the most transparent election ever i mentioned that in my chairman's speech and i want to thank the team for making that a reality i want to thank the communications team incredible amount of work that has been done was done in the last couple of weeks and i'm grateful to everyone for that and just so everyone knows august was the highest primary turnout we've ever had in the history of maricopa county um and there were a lot of comments uh out there on you know how long it took but it's actually the quickest that we've ever counted this number of ballots and i just want to make sure that people understand that i think most people do but i think it's extremely important and of course at maricopa county we're never happy with where we're at and so i went in particular actually all three of you there at the table you're already talking about the next election how we can do an even better job and as good as this one was done we're always focused on continuous improvement and my colleagues and i look forward to to jumping into that with you supervisor sellers yeah mr chairman i i also want to extend my appreciation for the communications group in the elections department through all the the questions and unnecessary feedback that we got during the election the way they handled that and the way they communicated for us was outstanding and what a great group they are thank you thank you supervisor sellers vice chair hickman as i'm prone to do i'm going to ask the clerk how many people currently are on right now watching this canvas this very very important function that the board and the elections department provides uh transparently chairman supervisor hickman if you give me a few minutes i don't account for you happy to get that thank you thank you mr chairman i think now that a word has gone out that it's your birthday the numbers are skyrocketing so with that i'm going to turn it over to uh the the man of the hour uh county recorder birthday boy you guys made me come here on my birthday i get to speak at you all right does this work whoops it doesn't get to go up all right it's all right it facilitates my horrendous posture this way i know my normal state affairs okay uh thanks all for the opportunity to talk about the august primary when i first ran for this office i'd assumed that i would eventually be assessed by the rubric by which elections have long been assessed things like did ballots go out on time were ballots correctly printed did voting locations open on time were people forced to stay in line for a long time and in the time between running for office starting to run for office and taking office the board obviously took statutory authority over some of these responsibilities but i assume the rubric would largely remain the same and judged by the usual metrics the election was a resounding success so yea us did ballots go out on time yes we sent out 1.4 million ballots on time many voters received these one day after we mailed them all voters were able to track their ballots through all stages of the process were ballots correctly printed yes in pinal county we unfortunately witnessed that this is a complicated process and things can go wrong maricopa county had over 19 000 ballot styles for the primary election and we got them right we're voting this accurate i posit that voting lists are the most accurate that they've been in recent history this has been a priority for my office and i'm so proud of the work that janine and her team and voter registration have done and continue to do did people have access to information on how to vote we did more with the media than ever before we launched a rebuilt website we responded to over 17 000 emails during the 27 elect day election period and we responded in under 30 minutes on average for emails sent during business hours our call center took in many many calls and kept wait times on election day under 10 minutes and i think people know that if you message me on twitter i will respond did people have options to vote yes they had more options than ever before they could vote by mail they could drop off their mail ballot they could drop it off at a voting location they could drop it off at a dropbox they can vote in person for any of the 26 days before election day at any of the voting locations and on election day they could vote at any of the 210 voting locations which is more options than ever before in maricopa county were people able to vote and was voting accessible yes as bill said this was the largest turnout ever in a maricopa county august primary on the accessibility front we continued to serve many voters through our special election boards that would send out a republican and a democrat to group homes to nursing homes to hospitals if needed they would meet the person there and assist with the process we sent out braille ballots we sent out large print ballots many many came back we had accessible voting devices at every single voting location that worked as they should and were always there did voting locations open on time yes scott will touch on this but i think it's truly impressive that every single voting location opened on time every single day of the 27 day were people forced to stay in line for a long period of time nobody wants to do that in august no we had virtually no lines on election on any of the days before election day and on election day we kept all lines to under 15 minutes for most of the day until the very end of the day when people rushed into a few locations just to get in before 7 pm and that's something that we're going to continue to work on but it was a success we're all political interests treated fairly yes i'm proud of the relationships that we've built with nancy mickey and brandon of the democratic republican and libertarian parties i suspect that these relationships were more active than they've ever been before and i'm grateful for their partnership were people able to observe the process yes we had so many observers observers on observers it was it was actually a pretty impressive showing by the parties political party observers were at voting locations throughout all 27 days of the election period they were in our ballot processing room they were in our signature verification rooms they were in our tabulation center and we worked closely with them we had more cameras and higher definition cameras than ever before when a member of the media actually wired me up and adjusted my clothing while doing so i heard about it within 30 minutes from people online who said i no longer was able to dress myself which may or may not be true but not for that reason when a media station did a segment at a dropbox at mctech at 4am we heard about it within an hour from the council for the republican party were ballots handled securely and with care yes we had more tracking devices and chain of custody reports than ever before and we have taken our security measures to new heights with things like serialized tamper evidence seals on virtually everything every time ballots are moved were ballots tabulated accurately yes the pre-election logic and accuracy test done by the secretary of state's office confirmed the accuracy of our tabulation equipment and the post-election hand count audit of a statistically significant number of ballots performed not by us but performed by the political parties confirmed the accuracy of the tabulation equipment we also did a post-election logic and accuracy test that confirmed once again the accuracy of the equipment did we confirm identity yes to vote in person you have to first scan your id and then you have to show it to a poll worker who comes over to vote by mail you have to use the green ballot affidavit envelope with a unique barcode that links to your voter id profile and you have to sign your envelope we added additional audit cues to the signature review process that made it even more robust were ballots tabulated in a timely manner yes as as chairman gates suggested this was actually broke some records and on tuesday election night we released the results of 600 000 ballots which included all ballots that had been received by sunday elects before election day which was a record for maricopa county and you know i'm stealing some of your thunder already but i'll let you get more into that did we work well with the media yes they were permanent fixtures at mctech for the week leading up to the election those are relationships that we greatly valued we answered scores of emails as chairman sellers suggested and did many many media interviews we are grateful for their partnership whether it was the arizona republic the mir the capitol times vote b arizona agenda axios associated press washington post new york times k t a r k jazz abc 15 arizona family fox 10 nbc 12 they were all there we worked with them closely did we keep up with our other responsibilities while doing this yes while running this election we also continued to properly and effectively serve our recording customers we processed the candidate filings for the non-partisan races in november like school boards and water boards we participated in the candidate challenges for those races and we did the humongous work of combing through the thousands and thousands of petition sheets for the three proposed statewide initiatives did we support our permanent workers yes and i'm particularly proud of this one and i'm grateful that the team remains so strong we're reading about election officials throughout the country who are very reasonably saying enough is enough and scott sent me a link just yesterday of an entire elections department in a county in texas just getting up and walking away but we in maricopa county remain intact and i think depending on the day for the most part happy so hopefully we'll keep that up did we support our temporary workers one of whom is here today yes we increased pay we offered bonuses we increased training with our programs like our new premium poll worker training and starting this week we will be surveying our temporary workers to see exactly how they felt the process went and what we can continue to do to improve when temporary workers were subjected to some of the violence of this brave new world of elections we immediately took action thanks to the good leadership of supervisor gates and we improved the situation and we let them know that we have their backs did we work together as a whole county as a team yes and it is truly a team sheriff penzone did everything he could to ensure that voters and workers were safe and he succeeded with the assistance of the amazing people at local law enforcement state law enforcement and federal law enforcement assessor eddie cook and treasurer john allen did everything they could to make sure that the star call center was ready for the massive amount of calls and actually assessor cook was out in the field answering election questions on elections day on election day our awesome new county attorney rachel mitchell got to remind people that the eighth commandment thou shalt not steal is still in effect and applies to county property as well she is also partnering with us on potentially pursuing some of the targeted threats sent to our office did we get in the trenches yes all the leadership team barely slept for an entire week i.t director nate could be seen carrying boxes throughout the warehouse at 1am abby and kara stayed up for 30 hours straight to make sure all the early ballot envelopes dropped off on election day were scanned overnight such that we could immediately begin signature verification i littered many rooms in mctech with cans of diet coke as i hopped on everything from signature verification to warehousing and of course ray and scott continued to lead the charge as they always do working incredibly hard even up until today and i know some short sleep nights went into producing this report that they'll present here today so fortunately most people still continue to judge us by this traditional rubric and so far 86 percent of survey respondents have said their experience was excellent or very good we also know that there's a cadre of people who desperately want us to fail and quite frankly treat us with a level of hate and contempt that is inhumane they do this not because of any factual driven analysis they do this simply because we're election workers and simply because we've consistently told the truth over the last two years we received hundreds hundreds of profanity-laced emails and messages from all over the country as an example steve do your [ __ ] job you [ __ ] count the ballots already another steve i understand you can't deviate from the election steel but you will lose in the end perhaps trump will have you hung as a traitor when he's president again hope it's broadcasted live on pay-per-view or something i'd like to have you in a black and white poster in my office of you hanging from the end of a rope during your gitmo trial and execution this was sent by somebody who wanted us to have the 122 000 early ballots dropped off on election night tabulated by election night as well so i guess he didn't want us to signature verify them and nobody calls me steve stephen our call center attendants would be regularly abused by screaming shouting all the profanity you can think of and sometimes only to find out that the caller was from massachusetts to those people i'd say you're not just trying to thwart my political career you're not just rooting against bill gates or clint hickman or steve garrier or gallardo you're rooting against american democracy and we're not going to listen to that we're going to continue to improve on the successful election we just ran because yes there are improvements that we can and should make and then we're going to do a great job as a team again in november thanks [Music] uh stephen can't thank you enough um for everything you said i hope that uh um i hope that when juanita tells us the number of folks that did go up uh precipitously because of it being your birthday because people need to hear what you just said and i i can't thank you enough for your leadership uh we are lucky to have you we really are okay so with that someone else we're very lucky to have as our elections director co-elections director scott jarrett thank you mr chairman members of the board and it's always very difficult to follow recorder richer especially on his birthday um so happy birthday um and also i do want to thank you for inviting us to present the canvas to the board today further your consideration on a day when you discuss the economy and housing and transportation things that we've been as the recorder mentioned working to canvas this election working to count all those votes so it's hard for us to even realize that there's other things going on in the world so it was refreshing to know that at least other people are considering those very very important things that will help also serve the voters of maricopa county but all residents of maricopa county so but we are here today for the canvassing of the election and what is the canvassing of the elections and essentially it's the accounting of all the ballots that were counted in the election but it's more than that it is all the work that goes in to all the processes that we do to administer the election um it includes thousands and thousands of pages of reports that will show how those ballots were counted not only at a summary level but in detail at every single precinct for every single contest it's also an accounting for the number of ballots that um went through were requested by early voters and then some of those ballots that were rejected due to not having a or having a blank signature or having a question signature turn into a bad signature through our signature verification process it's also an accounting of all the provisional ballots that were cast and whether those ballots were counted or whether they were not counted and all of that information is provided not only in summary but in very much detail at the precinct based level so right before you i handed out a summary level of the canvas this is the board of supervisor summary that's being considered but there's also a statement about a full complete canvas which is 20 times the size which i just delivered to the clerk of the board and through the cds that were burnt with all of those files that would be considered for the board as we're canvassing the selection let me well scott's well scott's getting that uh i just got a message was it is it 16 people have taken their time to watch this today well um supervisor hickman i just got an update as of right now 93 on youtube and 26 on the webinar okay thank you thank you mr chairman mr hickman it's nice to know that when i'm speaking it's much higher than that that birthday thing got out there fast because i think we started with 16 before he started talking can you go back one slide okay all right so just some numbers um before we get into the turnout and the nuts and bolts of the election so mention that we had a huge number of voters participate or vote early in record turnout um but part of that was through early ballot requests so we had over 1.4 million voters request an early ballot and i'm stealing some arrays thunder here but we had 759 000 of those returned so that represents 53 return rate for voters that vote early we talk about the different ways that voters can participate and we provide very accessible elections whether that is voting through the mail or taking an early ballot and dropping it off in person or voting in person early or voting on election day but i wanted to highlight also the number of ballots so we had over 31 000 early ballot recipients choose not to use that early ballot and actually go vote in person whether that be early on election day when we look at non-early ballot requesters so that's someone that did not either go in person early or did not select to get a ballot through the mail either on the active early voting list or sign up for a one-time request we had just over 91 000 voters participate but out of one there's over 1 million of those voters so that's only an 8.6 turnout so if you are an early ballot requester you participate at a 50 rate if you were not an early ballot requester you participated at an 8.6 percent rate a significant difference um recorder richard mentioned that we had over 19 000 different ballot styles that's something i get asked a lot how can you have that many pallet styles in an election it's simple we have over 935 precincts once you start splitting those precincts by fire districts splitting those sprees those precincts by school districts and other special districts we get well over a thousand different potential ballast styles but then we need to create those in a fed-only ballot style we need to create those into a a political party ballot style for a republican a democrat if they have precinct committee men on the ballot but then we need to create a different ballot style for a independent voter that might select that democrat ballot or that republican ballot that isn't eligible to vote the precinct commitment so once you add all of those up that's how we get up to 19 000 but we also add additional security measures into that process we create election day ballots we create provisional ballots and we create early ballots the reason we do that is because we don't want a provisional ballot or a early ballot that a voter might bring into a voting location to be fed through that precinct-based tabulator just an additional security protocol that most voters don't have any insight into the complexity of why we create that many ballot styles but that doesn't save our our team members and our staff anytime we have to proof every one of those ballot styles that's why when we were preparing for this august primary we were building that ballot way back in may several months before the election so that we can hit that iokava mailing deadline which was in middle of june we had over 210 voting locations on election day but we had a very thorough phased-in opening process i get asked questions about why do you have so many voting locations open during emergency voting and it's simple because well first off we want to provide as much access to voters to be able to participate if they have an issue that would prevent them from voting on election day they they could then take advantage of that emergency voting location our emergency voting weekend but i also want to have very reliable in-person voting on election day so if poll workers are working that weekend we had 119 voting locations open the day before emergency voting those locations are going to be much more successful on election day because they had that soft opening the day before election day right making sure all the equipment worked make sure that they were refining their process it just makes the election experience for the voter that much better we had over 2 000 temporary workers supporting this election 1900 different poll workers we had over 500 well we were trying to recruit 500 different temporary workers to work at mctech we ended up falling short by about a hundred we got 450 out of about 550.
A lot of that was driven through economic issues which you were talking about earlier in the meeting so higher gas prices people did not want to commute down to mctech we had um much we met had uh we're competing with higher salaries when we're looking at um maybe fast food restaurants that could pay 19 18 or 18 19 20 an hour versus our salary so we came to the board and we readjusted our salaries for our temporary workers so we could be successful we mentioned that we had more turnout can we move forward than ever before well as a as a number right the number of voters that participated we had 800 let's go one more slide too we had 866 924 voters cast about in this election that is right over 35 percent when we look back at what we made in projections back in may we thought it would be anywhere from 28 to 36 percent so we're almost at the the top end of that range so if we start using this information to make projections for the upcoming november general election where we factored a high end range of about 69 turnout i think maybe that could be a marker or a gauge that we can use for what that november general election will look like so if you look at the average number of turn turnout if you go back all the way the 1980s to currently the average number of turnout turnout for an august primary is 27 so we are eight percent higher our percentage points higher than we are on average we also had 2 million 474 registered voters in this election this is one of the areas where we didn't make our projections correctly so back when we were looking at february march april time frame to look at how many registered voters would be registered for the august primary we calculated about 2.7 million so that could be an indication of the economy right there's not as many people moving here through these last few months that are registering to vote could be an indication that the august primaries moved up into the summer so not as many people are participating at that point in time even though we had 35 percent turnout but it also could be that people are going to wait to participate in the actual general election so when i look back at numbers such as the two to three months prior to a general election usually we will have anywhere from 40 to 60 new voters added to the roles every single month so recorder's office is going to potentially be very busy over the next few months adding those new voters that want to participate in the general election mr chairman just welcome nice chair hickman well steven's here is that also we stephen you talked about cleaning up the voter rolls does that does that mean we've started at a lower you cleaned up the voter rolls and then waited for people to re-register or what does that have any impact yes it does and we had the opportunity to send out a whole bunch of mailings including the new voter id cards the 90-day notices we had some jurisdictional elections and the more mail we send out the more we can process and get feedback and start the inactivation process and we were like i said very attentive to that so it's it's perfectly lawfully done but because of the decennial redistricting that did afford us another opportunity to mail every single voter in the county a piece of mail many of which you know come back and then you start the process okay thank you and one other number on this slide is the number of provisional voters so we had two um just over our shy of 3000 provisional voters but as a percentage for the normal august primary that was only two percent of the election day voters which the prior low record was in 2020 whereas three percent but if you go back to 2018 it was 11 percent of the voters on election day voted provisionally over almost 13 000 so one of the advantages of why that's so low is because we use a boat center model so if they vote they can go to any one of those locations and then we can print one of those 19 000 ballot styles make sure that they have that right ballot style and issue it in the voting location we can go forward mr chairman supervisor galvin scott was that number 11 or 13 in 2018.
I think you said 13. so it was 11 it was just shy of 13 000 voters so 12 968 in 2018 11 of the election day voters thank you one thing that we noticed in this election cycle there was a reversion revision back to participating in person so if we looked at 2020 2018 every single election was progressively going more and more early voters in this process so we had 67 percent of voters participate through the mail we had 33 percent of voters either vote in person early vote in emergency voting weekend vote on election day or drop off their ballot at one of our voting locations so that's a significant uptick so in 2020 we were at the high 80 percent of voters that um voted through the mail so now that we're we're down to 67 so that was an indication on election day we had 108 000 voters vote in person on election day and then as recorder mentioned we had 122 000 voters drop off their ballot on election day as well so we had over 230 000 voters visit one of our voting locations on election day and our lines on average were less than one minute we did have a few locations that towards the end of the day as the recorder mentioned their lines did get up there that's one of the things we will be focusing on especially in the outlets at anthem area right that got up to about a 50-minute wait time the last hour and a half of voting so we'll be looking to add another location in that area to make sure that we're able to serve those general election voters so with that i'm going to actually turn it over to mr valenzuela for the next couple slides to talk about early voting chairman members of the board uh since the recorder scott stole all the thunder i take questions now but uh we'll just add a little bit more meat to the bones on but all the data that there's being provided i did want to add one more statistics that scott covered the provisionals because i am the dinosaur of elections so to speak um what isn't being presented here is that we used to have 120 thousand provisional ballots so go supervised gallaudet would remember that so we have gone from that to and i know for a fact we had 26 000 that we report on the canvas that we call real-time provisionals that are individuals that used to have to vote because they got an early ballot all of those statistical ones that chose to come in they would have had to vote provisional now because of our real-time system we're able to give see that they had not cast it avoid that early ballot and give them a regular about 26 000 that this number that we're talking about 2800 even with without that would have been over 30 000 so it's a really testament to continued improvement so with that i'm going to talk a little bit about our 86 percent of the voters said their experience we did a survey the surveys closes today if i'm not mistaken we send it out to over 420 000 of our voters that we have emails for and those individuals have a lot have responded and that's we're getting some of these statistics but the 86 of the voters uh that voted early specifically on the early experience said it was excellent to very good um i actually went a little bit further because scott put that side and i said well how many said they were at least satisfied i'm i'm okay with satisfied i know that sounds terrible but that they didn't say it was terrible so we actually have 98 of our voters that said they were satisfied good to very good so i'll take that 98 percent just want to point that out that you know we aim high but i'm satisfied we'll do well so the next slide um one of the things is because we've improved access to the mail and to the voting process but specifically to the mail process we had one back sorry but we specifically have our improved access to the to the mail is and the recorder touched a little bit on it the 90-day mailers which i always mentioned that it seems very altruistic of us to notify the able voters that you're getting a ballot and we do this at 90 days required by law but actually selfishly it's also exactly for the registration maintenance we mail that ahead to tell them yes you're you're going to get a ballot watch out for it on this day or you're an independent you're not going to get one for the primary to tell us and here's how you can do that online or through ballot ready but also that mail is sent return service requested so all of those that came back we were able to before that first mailing get those people what i'll call opted out saying wait a minute they're not at that address so it's a good partnership with the usps good process that allows us to a lot of people don't realize again it's about letting them know the ballot but also serving a purpose um further down some of the access stuff the online requests uh we our star center and our call center and we opened up our online requests we received uh meet on the bonezeer we received 20 almost 24 000 requests online so the voter was able to avoid calling uh but actually serve themselves through mobile app that we had to be able to make that request so 24 000 and then our call center received a little bit over near five thousand i think it's four thousand six hundred total phone calls so to make a request so again access to the process access to the mail we also have implemented continued improvement and we mentioned ray vice chair hickman had a question yeah ray um you know uh i didn't hear about it too much but i did hear so just with you mailing out the 90-day uh notice and and things you we we get to see people talk about i've i got my son's ballot and he went away to college six years ago and all sorts of stuff on on social media so i really was hoping this primary would flush out that did we reach back or did we have some way of reaching back to those people that were saying that out on social media but then reaching back and saying well then this is going to be really easy we can clean it up before the general did we did we do we have some sort of system do we have some way of talking to those people to make that count even that much less yeah i mean we have been active and you do get that 90-day notice card it's easy to fill out if somebody has left your household also that new box that we have on the yellow ballot carrying envelopes if the person doesn't live there you can simply check that return it into the mail so we are responding to those people when somebody does move it does require some action until they show up in the eric system which would allow us to know if they're participating in another state at that point which point we could de-list them but otherwise there are a lot of fee there's feedback mechanisms every single time we send you a piece of mail there's a feedback mechanism and chairman and supervisor to that also just so you know that there was responsiveness to the social media i think supervisors recorder richard was quite active and saying to but generally to direct message him with that and the most part we always see the sons daughters uh and again i keep mentioning my son if he's listening that he can move out and we'll test this but he's but uh but a lot of it has to do they had this first time they've lived there they haven't had a change of address so they a lot of times that son or daughter moves for the first time this is not they weren't getting mail when they were eight nine ten and so on so a lot of that when we do contact it's just this was their first move so there's through the post office they don't have that son daughter has moved per se so again we do we are proactive though and we will continue that as part of our list maintenance and we welcome those individuals that have that to to contact us through and we'll use the voter info at risk.maricopa vote the email voter info and they can get that to us i don't i don't know what your informal assessment of it was but i felt that the number was actually significantly lower than i was even expecting in terms of the number of people posting about that which i hope is a testament to the list maintenance we've been doing over the last year but there's always going to be those instances and yes i did respond to them directly when uh afforded the opportunity yeah and stephen i i'm not implying that it was high yeah what i was saying is um we we find out things about primaries and find how we can get better and we did that in 2020 we used information uh in about the primary to pull off a fabulous general and um you know people are questioning if it truly was fabulous even two years ago from two years ago so i'm just saying if there's something that we are learning in that regard i am very familiar with all the steps that you guys have put forward and especially you stephen uh of putting forward and getting these types of things i'm just looking for anything that can happen the primary or did happen or didn't happen in the primary to rectify get fixed and be prepared prepared for the general that we can't just go back again and sure so we use the mail sent out just as we use any other mail for the that was sent out for the primary to do list maintenance for the general and any return mail that we got for the primary will be used in time for the general and mr chairman supervisor hickman the recorder mentioned we had great partnerships with the county political parties and we do but if a voter does not want to contact us and we've set up all these great mechanisms but if a voter doesn't want to contact us they can contact their local legislative district chair right and they can submit the list to us as well and we'll take that list and then start the process of then sending out the letter to confirm is this voter still there so lots of different ways for us to maintain those lists they just have to take the action to notify us or if they don't notify us through these other mechanisms you brought it up okay then i'm going to ask i am very and all of us are familiar and with the partnership that goes on with the with the parties and you in fact stephen you gave them credit for their by their first name because i know you have those communications and have had those for two years um i know that these parties have put observers in i know i know all the all the parties that on almost statutorily they're required on the different types of not just observation but participation in voter boards signature verification have they weighed in i mean the now this election is and all the operations is now officially almost officially over but have they weighed in with a report with you guys what they saw what they what they um found uh the questions what we could do better what they could do better uh volunteerism i mean do they do they submit any type of report unless it's just after the fact and we have a fight i'm just wondering if they're submitting these things to you beforehand that we can make ourselves better before a general so mr chairman supervisor hickman one of the process improvements that we made over 2020 is we established at least at mctech an an ambassador program so when the political parties would come into mctech and observe we had then had someone that was trained on our processes that could immediately answer those questions for the political party observers we also then issue those observers a form where they can submit questions in writing so if they saw something that they were concerned about they could submit that to us and then we could respond immediately and we had a tracking list but the next step of that process is we will be meeting with all so we met with the county chairs in early june to talk through all the different observation opportunities that they would have to observe through the selection process we'll do the same in september so that'll be a likely point when they will relay some of those concerns but i've not seen received anything official in writing and they don't wait we had a constant stream of communication with with mickey nighland with eric spencer both of whom have been complimentary i think both of whom the the people who participate in the process are not usually the ones to be as as critical afterwards and i think that they've been complementary and i think that they would all say that our customer service even if they don't agree with every single decision that's made that our customer service has been excellent and i hope that the the adp would uh i know the adp would say that as well and and they all did pre-meetings i mean uh eric spencer was came to mctech multiple times adp came multiple times brandon zlatan from the libertarian party came multiple times so um you know we we respond for any any questions and those questions continue and certainly there has been no shortage of information and and i would add to that as well that you know there were some of these issues being raised by leaders within the republican party on twitter so i reached out to eric spencer and he told me he echoed exactly what stephen said again he headed up the election day operation the operation that i frankly did back in the mid 2000s and he was very pleased said it was one of the best elections that he's seen so again just to bolster what's been said here chairman members of the board we'll just we'll run through these quickly is again but again i do want to emphasize because of public listening that we do have many ways for them to access this process so and then some improved continued improvement the text to cure was one of the ones that we mentioned that was a new thing that when we have a questionable signature we are we send a letter we send an email we send a text but we also added this feature where you can the voter can come in and upload a photo id driver's license it still has to be one of the required photo id state area state id or arizona driver's license but to assist us in helping uh cure that ballot if that comes into question informed delivery we partner with the usc usps once again to and everybody's familiar with you should sign up for that basically it tells you what's in your mailbox today and it has actual image of it if the entity chooses to do that we have opted to do that you will actually if you sign up for informed delivery you know what's in your mailbox today and it'll show a picture of that yellow colored envelope and and a link for you to go over there to check status so that informed delivery is another great service that will hopefully increase people that are out there participation in that process uh secured ballot drop boxes the one thing i'm really excited about is our ballot tracking system part of the survey and we didn't get a lot of folks back or we wish we had more folks using it but we did have 40 of the individuals we surveyed said they utilized this tracking service and they used the actual text message another 18 percent that used the b ballot ready which is a personalized dashboard for the voter to go to be ballot ready dot vote and they can actually see without having to sign up if they didn't wish to do that and then unfortunately at 43 that indicated they didn't track their ballot either that means they're that comfortable in the process and that's how i'm going to take it that they they trusted the process but again a good number of folks that did participate in utilizing that service next slide is here's one that i believe is the most important at least to me and and it tells some of the special assist accessibility and military and overseas voters and again i always say if anybody deserves a right to vote it's our military and overseas and we're very proud of the fact that we can instantly we have almost and i think our last stats were about 92 percent of our voters that are military overseas get electronic opt for electronic delivery the rest do mail we have one that asks for fax i think they bought that fax in 1990 and they said i'm going to use it so but we do have a quite a bit of robust process and we had 1021 military and overseas voters that participate in this particular election um uh actually it was out of 4 800 that were sent so some of these may or may not have been they made independents that didn't tell us but they uh the return rate was about 23 for those military and overseas voters uh the other one that's kind of impressive that i think is a new thing that we've been very proactive on is our special needs program uh 376 voters that were served through the special needs that includes 17 braille ballots returned these are returns 257 large print and 102 seb facilities or voters that we that means our special election boards went out to a hospital went out to a nursing home went out and these individuals were facilitated i even have a note that we had one centenarian 103 year old she actually wrote us and she said that she was very excited to cast her vote so we had somebody 103 year old vote on through the seb process so proud of that uh then of course we had 223 voters in person we have an accessible device at every single location so those 210 locations you can come in has sift puff it has large print where you can expand it has all these different features so you an accessible voter can vote independently and we had 223 voters utilize that accessible device on election day or in person early and last but not least we had 65 voters cast ballot using curbside voting that's another option that many counties many states they utilize it only if their building's not accessible we deploy it at every facility whether it's accessible and that's for an individual that can contact us and we will come out to their vehicle they don't have to leave their vehicle because of some limitation and we will assist them with two individuals differing party and cast their ballot almost like a special election board but on election day right at the curbside so again a lot of good data a lot of good information and with that i'll turn it back over to scott if we can move forward one slide and not to be outdone by ray which so this says 74 of voters said that their in-person voting experience was excellent or very good if you ad satisfied we get up to 93 percent try to try to do better next time [Laughter] right one more slide we've talked about the different in-person voting options it was a significant number above what we offered in 2020 so at four weeks out we had 10 voting locations open versus four two weeks out we had 54 voting locations open versus 47 during the emergency voting weekend mentioned on that monday before election day we had 119 open versus 79 and then on election day we had 210 options for voters to participate um versus 99 and 2020.
So we did survey voters and asked them how long did they wait in line so we're not just trusting our data entry from so every 15 minutes we're having our poll workers enter the number of voters in line we know how quickly they're entered and are they're checking in so then we can post that information on the website so voters have that information before they choose which location they want to go to um but we asked the voters themselves how long did they wait in line 68.5 said no wait at all we had another 27.3 say 1 to 15 minutes so over 93 percent said one one to 15 minutes or none at all um so a significant number had very very very short wait times no yeah 95 quick math i i always get asked to do math at these public board meetings and i'm not very good at it all right if we can go to the next slide i'm going to let ray cover this one and this just because it's in the 90 that's why i said i'll take that one but again 90 of the voters informed the county about their that they felt informed about the options we did a quite a bit of outreach on social media quite a bit of things and the next slide will actually delineate those things that we've done we can and i think supervisor sellers complimented the comms team i know a compliment the county communications team phil's mosley and so on all participating in this but part of our things is again 90 of the voters felt that they were informed properly informed so on this next slide it'll talk about and i'll just run through for the benefit of the public as far as where we're at and what we did but the key thing and i again because i know the public listening i want to put out there the be ballotready.vote election is technically about to be canvassed but it's not over you can still go see well i hadn't checked my status i am curious so those 43 that haven't were we welcome that transparency so no be ballot ready dot vote um but we did a lot of advertising thank you to the board thank you to thinking as far as budgeting for that and we went beyond just you know regular media we went billboards we went did the tv you have a lot of our folks um to save a few dollars we we our actors were some of our staff that uh they were really happy to be part to be memorialized in that that you know i uh fill commercials so again we did quite a few of those connected tv print digital social media and again specifically the outdoor billboards are out there media interviews i know the recorder did quite a bit and we've had quite an extensive media outreach as far as in english and in the spanish market so we were making sure we had that particular options we also had our the student election worker program that went we reimplemented the step program if you will and that was where we get somebody 16 to 18 in high school that can actually come serve as a board worker on election day so we had quite a good participation on that and those are our future board workers those are our future voters so again uh that gave us a lot of spotlight because it went out to all the school districts and those school districts were able to say you know again involve some of those particular students our website new website launch specific for the election so it's a little bit more intuitive we're always continuing improving we're taking feedback as to what you know we can do more but that's another uh act that took place to help inform voters one of they think the bigger ones is the events and tours we have been very proactive to get these groups out there whether it's a community partner whether it's a political party whether it's a business partner even some where you may say well why does ibm need a tour well sometimes they are affected by wanting to promote their boards their workers to come be board workers so again we did quite a few events and tours we have a lot of those that i think hopefully demystified some of this process because it's hard to do it in a sound bite in a commercial a 30-second mean but uh when we get them in and we get them for a good two to four hours whether they we tell them it's like a one hour and then we hold them hostage but again we do that is another good process that we've been implemented and of course our voter education we have webinars we've been doing for those that can't come to us we go to them we've had already held some webinars were had high participation 90 minute 40 minutes several different topics so that those individuals can participate and ask questions so those go well and then of course our toolkits which is our most impressed our comms team does is literally it's a set of infographics a set of information that is we give to every clerk city town clerk to all those communities of interest saying here's our toolkit it's a one-sheet handout that you can make copies of it so again we've done quite a bit to inform voters and the proof is in the 90 have said they they felt they were informed then here i'll turn it back to scott we can go forward two slides and um ray and i didn't know that our our staff members were invited to do the filming for the commercial so when we asked our communications director she said well you can apply to be on the radio and so ray very stupid they said you have a face for radio i don't know what that meant though all right so talking about our tabulation procedures and there's been a lot of information especially on social media about how long it takes or how quickly we're able to report results and it is a balance between ensuring the integrity and the accuracy of the pos of the process while trying to balance that with how quickly we're able to tabulate results and some of that is gets right down to all the checks and balances that we need to implement right right from the beginning to make sure that we do have an accurately reported result and accurately accuracy is paramount in this process and that starts with ensuring that we have equipment that can tabulate those ballots accurately and we make sure that and how we do that is making sure that we have equipment that's certified at the national level not only certified at the national level but certified at the state level so they go through a very robust series of tests to make sure that the equipment's reliable that it's secure and that it can accurately count ballots um i have here on the slide that our tabulation equipment can count ballots up to six to eight thousand ballots per hour however art we don't tabulate that quickly because we have many chain of custody logs that our staff members are completing as when the early voting team processes those ballots they send them to us in batches of 200.
There's a chain of custody form that that we can tie that right back to the bipartisan board that separated that ballot from the early voting affidavit so that's that chain of custody then we have our tabulation operators filling out logs to say how many ballots were sent to us from the early ballot processing boards does that match the number of ballots that went through the tabulator if it doesn't then we're doing some sort of reconciliation to figure out why it might not match and we're able to tie that for every single one of those batches we were able to confirm okay this is where maybe we made a misstep in that process and we're able to find that ballot and that's incredibly important to the integrity of the process but the other piece too is we recognize that voters want to know those results quickly if we can go to the next slide and we've talked about that this is one of the fastest times that we've ever been able to report results so we had again more ballots counted than in any other august primary in our history in maricopa county so this was also on election night we had six just over 600 000 ballots reported in that first first post on election night that was all the early ballots that have been received as of sunday before the election we then reported results the very last post of the night was at 12 40 p.m that was the second fastest ever and i want to talk through that election night reporting process so in maricopa county we have 210 different voting locations right we might have a voter that checks in and most of or a lot of voters do check in right before that 7 pm deadline right so there might be a line some of those locations might have 15 20 minutes we had one mentioned and outlets of anthem that had a 50 minute wait time so that location that voters not going to get their ballot until about 7 50.
It could take them 20 30 minutes to even vote that ballot depending on the time that they take as they're making their decisions so those locations might not be done packing up their the ballots taking that were voted and went through the tabulator packing up all those early ballots from those boxes logging all that information so we have a very thorough chain of custody on all that information to well after nine approaching 10 pm at night then we're going to send those voters are those poll workers bipartisan team members to a receiving site that's monitored by sheriff's deputies that has county employees bipartisan team members then monitoring that chain of custody making sure we're getting every single item that needs to be returned to us on election night so once those get back to us some of those trucks aren't arriving till much after 11 pm that's when then we go through another audit check so we're verifying okay these are all the items that were sent to us from the different trucks and those receiving sites these are all the items that the poll workers were supposed to send to us we're scanning those into our tagging system so we can monitor that chain of custody and all of that happens before we start posting those results so we were posting nearly every hour after nine nine pm through that process but the last post was at 12 40 p.m and again the only time that we had a faster reporting time in the last couple decades was in 2012 which we posted just after midnight that election year so only beating us by about 30 minutes and that year was a year that we used to have what we called mps mobile sites where we had city and town clerks we'd have our poll workers go to those sites and they upload those results through an analog line so a telephone line back to the elections department we no longer transmit results that way they're hand delivered back to the elections department i just want to make sure everyone understands exactly what that represents before people go to sleep on tuesday election night at that 12 40 a.m so that means that at that point before if you're somebody who's really interested in politics and staying up late before you go to sleep you have seen everything that was returned to us by sunday by early ballot and you have seen everything that was cast by a voter getting a new ballot printed on election day feeding that into a tabulator and we returned that tabulator's memory drive and feed it in so the only thing that then remains to be tabulated after you go to bed that first night are early ballots that are dropped off either on monday or tuesday election day or for some other reason including the statutory reason that we have a ballot curing deadline remain to be tabulated so and that's what this chart actually represents so the number of days it has taken us to finish that final post so the red bar in this graph is 2022 and we posted our results after eight days of and if you compare that back all the way to 2006 the average is 8.22 days right so we're slightly under the average time it takes us to post final results but if you look back from 2006 to 2016 there was no post-election signature cure period right so voters if they had a question signature they would have to resolve that for election night so it's only been the last three elections that we've that voters have had that option to cure their signature again that's a voter-centric law that was passed by the arizona state legislature to allow voters to cure their signatures and since then we're right in line with our average time it takes so we that was seven days after the election where voters could cure their signature the very next day that morning we performed our final audits and checks of all the different ballots that we received in the tabulation center and then we posted final results that evening so one day after that cure deadline i do want to highlight we had 122 000 ballots dropped off on election day those early ballots that needed to be signature verified then sent to a early ballot processing team bipartisan board to separate that ballot then sent to tabulation when we compare that to 2020 there were 74 000 ballots dropped off on election day so we had significantly more to process in that same time frame in 2022 than we did in 2020.
So that represents what 15 of the total ballots cast were those early ballots that were dropped off on election day we cannot pick those up until polls close and as scott just mentioned sometimes if voters show up at 7 pm it doesn't mean that they're done at 7 pm that means we can't even begin to pick up those green early ballot affidavit envelopes until 8 8 30. then you have to drive them all the way to a receiving site then you have to drive them to our central facility then because we want to make sure that you haven't voted already we scan that barcode on every single green affidavit envelope then as i mentioned abby and cara staying up late making sure that all of those affidavit envelopes are imaged because then we take that image we do our signature verification we then do an audit cue of the signature verification and only then is it sent to the extraction process by a bipartisan team so no that doesn't just happen in two hours um we we wish we're going to try and get it faster and i'm very proud that we had an all hands on deck situation on wednesday and thursday and we banged out 122 000 signature verifications while maintaining the credibility and accuracy of that process but that process has to happen for a early ballot to be valid mr chairman vice chair hickman because i know you kind of look into this thing um i just kept reading hearing how come how come maricopa county can't count can't count as fast as florida i mean florida seems like they can i mean i i didn't delve deep into it i know that we have different statutes i know we have different things that are our county election versus a state election or individual county elections in florida but um what what's what's the answer there and then then also let me know what is the difference between a tabulated certified election versus a called election is so mr chairman professor hickman i did some analysis of some other states um i looked at michigan as well as florida and how long it took them to post the results now florida hasn't had a august pr or a primary election they happen to have it in august since 2020 their their 2022 election is actually in a couple weeks so to go back and do a apples to apples comparison we had to go to 2020 and i looked at several of the largest counties in that state and one of them was the county where where broward county and miami-dade county were it took them about three days after the august primary one of the big differences is it was they only have a two-day cure period right not a five-day business cure periods actually seven calendar days like arizona does a very different statute if you go to duvall county where um jacksonville is it took them actually 10 days in the august 2020 primary for them to post their final results actually longer than maricopa county took in 2020 and longer than we took in 2022 so every state and that is something that people don't recognize every state is counting ballots for several days after the election it's only those contests which are high profile and very very close that then people are paying attention to so and we do not call elections right that is the media that would then call elections but essentially the real call of the election is the canvas today and i will say the next agenda item right we're going to be doing an automatic recount in maricopa county uh because we have one contest the justice of the peace and west mcdowell that is separated by three votes so for those contests and those voters that voted in that contest it was very very important to them that we took our time and we did it right and now we're going to go through and do a recount of that contest as well those four thousand five hundred ballots that were voted in that contest chairman member uh supervisor hickman as well to that point two is also again the dinosaur of elections i know we have never ever no state in the union has ever reported election night it's not possible now there are some states to add to what scott's saying that are and i'm just going to use the term voter centric again not as voter centric they say no dropping off of ballots those 122 000 get rid of those votes we don't have to we can probably close on wednesday you know but there's so there's a lot of states that have different laws different curing different you know early voting ends a week ahead so you could go there and we could say for the speed of the results versus do you want to hear those 122 votes be heard so therein lies the difference between the different states and i don't know scott was going to mention but i'll still have stunned her that uh we actually have it scott put together that pima county second largest county in arizona finished nine days after the election and they had and now i feel like i'm throwing shade if that's still a term but uh 227 000 ballots they had cast over our 900 so nine days uh pinal county eight days was 77 000 yuma county seven days with 25 000 ballots uh yavapai county congratulations they they did it in seven days as well so sooner but with 83 000 ballots total so again give it a little bit of perspective at least from a state view and mr venezuela i just want to follow up i i don't like this dinosaur term i'm thinking more fine wine fine wine is much more appropriate but i think it is an opportunity to underline the fact that we do elections this board stephen richard do not vote on the rules that apply this is the legislature they set the rules and we follow them and it's very important that we follow them to the letter of all law but if folks in the legislature or other elected officials or other candidates you know who might be successful want things to be done differently it's up to them again we follow the rules we may be asked our opinions on how it might impact uh the accounting moving forward but i think it's very important that our uh that our residents understand that and that's been a long practice the dropping off of the early ballot and i think i saw congressman gallego do it i saw governor ducey do it so clearly a lot of arizonans like to do that and whether or not that remains is a public policy decision but we will continue to implement the law regarding pima county pima county again going back to tuesday late night if you stay up late what percentage of your results were were tabulated before you went to bed pima county which is a well-run elections county had a lower percentage of of results have yet so this is not a maricopa county thing if anything we're well we're ahead of the curve um regarding the florida stuff you know three days if you look at where we are in three days it's 99 of results are tabulated and i'll tell you people stop caring after that as long as all the contests are called then they they don't care and which is why it's even an aphorism in the elections administration world that your may your your turnout be high and may your margins be wide because with wide margins nobody cares they just assume that you've completed everything on election night the number of people who have told me well when helen purcell was there it was finished all on election night and i'll call helen and she said absolutely not but i had the good fortune of having some very not closely contested races and so you know if there is a flaw in the maricopa county system i guess that it is that we have uh hotly contested elections and so you know i i we we don't do that um we we don't control that yeah mr chairman i i wish we could just say instead of a called election i wish we could just put media called election media called election we don't call we we we call the election today when we certify the election we don't call an election and that's 2020 started the aggressiveness when fox called the election before it was certified so that's what we've been answering to for so many years in in people's heads that i feel because it was well wait a second you know so um anyway so this was hard for me to process because i remember so distinctly every single hour waiting for my own election results and i actually wound up founding that i won on wednesday not wednesday after election day but a week from wednesday because i was in a county-wide race that was separated by 4 500 votes a landslide victory as i like to say but you know that just goes to show that this is by no means a normal process now what i will be more careful of in the future is reminding myself that not everyone has gone through that same harrowing process that i went through not everyone has been a candidate on the ballot not everyone remembers mcsally versus cinema in 2018 where it took about you know it was a protracted race so we have to remind ourselves that this is new we will continue to work with county residents to to help them understand why it is it takes the time that it does we'll work with media but we'll also continue to speed up that process and i believe that ray and scott have been successful in speeding up that process i think know that we're going to look to do what we can to while working within the parameters of the law continue to make it faster yeah and i will just mention that in 2020 my landslide election took several days yeah my mind took a few too so mr government we usually refer to the august primary as one election but really it's dozens and dozens of elections we had 23 cities and towns having an election we have numerous candidates on the ballot having an election i do want to call out back again to that justice of the peace west mcdowell contest right that actually flipped on the last day that we reported results and it's separated by three so those candidates were very watching that very very closely probably very closely as a recorder richard was watching his contest in 2020 so all of these are different elections and that's why it's important that we count every ballot that we receive and make sure that was a legal ballot that was authorized to be counted and that takes time and trip mr chairman you mentioned some of the laws that arizona has that requires and adds integrity to the process but also then establishes extra time we've listed a few here the recorder mentioned that we can't collect those ballots on election day right during the day right we have to wait until those close those polls close at the end of the day and then allow any other voters to finish that voting process so that's required of ars 16564 and ars 16572 we have to do a signature verification on any one of those early ballots that are dropped off at election day that signature verification has to be done by humans individuals now the recorder mentioned we did an all hands on deck call to have staff a lot of our permanent staff to assist with that signature verification every one of those staff members went through significant training before they were authorized or even allowed to be able to perform that signature verification process but that was how we were able to get through 122 000 in a two-day time frame and then they have to go through a again humans involved in this process a bipartisan team of humans separating that ballot from the affidavit envelope to do that correctly it takes time and then we have to do post-election audits we want to be here before the board if we had not done our post-election logic and accuracy tests if we had not partnered with the political parties to come and do a hand count audit and which confirm the accuracy of all of our results so all of those are required by some based on statute and add integrity into this process but they also add time we can and ray and i would not be here um if it wasn't for the overwhelming support from our partners and our partners are um our poll workers our central board workers our observers that were at every one of our early voting locations our our election day locations and every one of our processing rooms signature verification rooms tabulation centers are facilities owners that are willing to provide a voting location to serve voters and also i don't have lists on here but our law enforcement partners we in may we invited every single um law enforcement entity in the county into a tour of mctech and we described to them what our processes were to keep our poll workers safe voters safe through this entire process i definitely want to say thank you to our law enforcement partners as well as sheriff penzone we could not do this work without a community right and most of these individuals are our neighbors our our family our friends um you could look around probably your neighborhood and there's dozens of people within your neighborhood that are working the election process and serving voters so just a big thank you and i don't know ray you have anything else i just echo that and again we serve a lot of constituencies it's not just a voter it's a candidate it's a political acts committee so a lot of that we need some of that partnership so we thank them we thank stephanie paul francine and t the our poll workers that are spotlighted up there um our centenarian that that cast are valid 103 years old but also the board without your support and and assistance we could not be at this state with our eoa with with our partnership and to have this successful election so with that uh recorder to close it out on his birthday sounds good i'm happy that you ended with this slide because i'm going to steal a phrase they use over at the courts which is to the jurors it's fair because you were there right and that exactly applies to the elections it's fair because our neighbors are there our republican friends our democrat friends libertarian friends we all do this together we rise our fault together and this is a great reminder it's people like like these folks who who made this a success along with everyone here other comments or questions from my colleagues no i'm good okay okay all right well jeremy real quickly i just want to uh once again thank um uh our county recorder stephen richards our elections directors uh for just doing a phenomenal job once again this year you know i i i was listening to some of the questions that that supervisor hickman was talking to in regards to having the election done all by by election night and i started in elections in 1988 i left in 2002 14 years i was there never in the history of elections is the election finalized on election night there are so many moving parts to it so many so many uh different ways for folks to vote and and it's just the process it takes time and they have done once again a phenomenal job in ensuring that our elections were safe secure they were accurate everyone's included everyone's involved the number of of observers in the media no one was kicked out no one was left out anyone who wants to be involved in the elections have an opportunity we saw the largest turnout in a primary which is amazing the hard-working officials i have no idea how many employees you guys hire but you have volunteers you have your permanent staff the number of folks involved republicans democrats independents all engaged in ensuring one thing that every eligible voter has the opportunity to cast their ballot to exercise that most fundamental right they have the right to vote this was the first year that we didn't have my mom my mom was always one that wanted to vote it was right up there with church you went to church you voted it was right up there this is the first election we did not have her with us to be able to exercise their right to vote and you start looking at the process because i kept thinking how do i get her off the voter rolls the process worked they took her off the voter rolls she passed away they took her off the voter the process works so i again i couldn't feel more confident in the canvas the elections the integrity that is put involved in this the it is it is phenomenal the work that they do down there and there's so many logistics and that's one of the biggest challenges is that a lot of the the critics out there they don't have a clue they don't understand the logistics and everything involved that's engaged in the in in in the election so bravo to the entire election staff i know there's there's hundreds of them right now mctech that have participated all the ones that worked at our vote centers the first thing i always look at mr chairman are the provisional ballots the first thing you want i look at it every canva is the provisional ballot and to see that only 2 800 provisional ballots out of the what was it the 866 000 that's that's something we should celebrate the process works the vote center model works people are able to cast her ballot people are able to exercise the right to vote and i couldn't be more pleased with the work that the three gentlemen here and many of men and women that are back there mctech that are doing just a phenomenal job so thank you all i appreciate it congratulations to our colleague who was on the ballot who had a remarkable election but i couldn't be more pleased mr chairman and thank you once again gentlemen for everything you do on behalf of the citizens of maricopa county thank you very much supervisor gallardo um yes supervisor sellers quick comment and that is you know scott and i were recently back in dc to receive yet another award for outstanding election staff which i assume that is being displayed now at mctech mr chairman superfaster sellers yes it is currently it's on my office but we're looking to maybe if we could get a pillar that we can erect in the parking lot then anyone who drives by can see it that was going to be on jack's dining room congratulations all right with that i would entertain a motion on this item mr chairman i'd like to make a motion to approve this official canvas item number five but also like to make a comment if that's okay please um mr richard even though it's your birthday you're still the boy wonder of elections so happy birthday ray and scott congratulations for a job well done congratulations to your entire team all of your employees i know you wish they could all be here all of us would like to individually wish our congratulations to them and how proud we are of them because frankly not only the eyes of the country but the eyes of the world were on maricopa county and arizona this past week a lot of these candidates have generated a lot of interest but also the way we conduct our elections have generated a lot of interest so also frankly a lot of people were hoping to see problems but frankly in this election there were virtually no problems right we're not accounting for any scandal we're not having to answer questions there's no media queries i'd also like to show that our democracy works right our constitution works in the first amendment there's freedom of the press the media i want to congratulate them for getting the word out and doing their job of educating their viewers and their readers and their listeners not only were they cooperative with us but they were also doing their job that's the first amendment at work also want to congratulate the poll workers the volunteers i don't remember where it was but there was one particular news story that should just showed all this frenetic activity of all these poll workers and volunteers just handling different ballots i was in awe i really was by all these people who did not have to be there late at night but doing the job that had to be done a thankless job but a necessary job and those people never know probably that i said that today or felt this way but i was literally in awe and so just inspired just grateful also want to extend my gratitude for the people that you highlighted today are other electeds the sheriff paul penzone treasurer john allen assessor eddie cook county attorney rachel mitchell this is all everyone working together as a team and they should be commended as well i'm sure people on their staff work just as hard as well everyone did their part to make sure that this election ran the way it should run smoothly and so i was the only candidate on this bench on this year for this primary but i had no worries no hesitation that the results would come out the way they would and that i was ready willing and able to accept the results no matter what win or lose because i knew that you guys are doing a good job and i knew those workers are doing a good job and no matter what happens in the future i'm always ready willing and able to accept those results and i just want to say mr richard you're an excellent recorder thank you thank you for those remarks well said and thank you for the motion i would take a second mr chairman i would be honored to second that motion to canvas the august second election primary election thank you for the second one of the items that uh supervisor galvin reference was the first amendment and in in that vein we do have a couple of folks here that would like to speak uh from the public we now have the motion the second on the floor so at this time we would love to hear from you we do have a two minute two minutes that you can speak on this item so our first person is chanelle powell i hear to speak in favor thanks for joining us good friend chanel i didn't see you back there how are you chairman gates members of the board my name is chanel poe former d5 tab member and poll maricopa county poll worker i am here today to share yep i am definitely here to share some of my experiences during the 2022 primary election i would be remiss if i did not say um thank you to my colleagues my fellow co-workers at six 15566 who are in the audience with me today to share some of our feedback from the election so the first thing i want to discuss is poll worker safety in the poll worker training poll worker safety was not discussed poll workers were also not aware of the shares new commitment to being able to show up at the election polls that was something that i learned about and i notified my team i happen to be the inspector at our polling location another thing is logistically we just want to make sure that everything is intact in terms of parking i was at a university and there was a garage and paid parking became a hassle i had to get in and reach out to some of my own personal connections at the university to make sure that voters were able to receive those parking passes i also want to talk about the poll worker shortage it's a poll worker shortage and while i appreciate the little bitty raise i really do believe that with inflation and all of these things that we deal with that there should be a raise to our poll workers scott mentioned it earlier we are some of our poll workers are want to come back most of them want to come back but some of them said they're not coming back because they can make more money as a short order cook when i really could use them and their expertise on my poll working team i want to address the guidance the felt tip pin guidance email that was sent out to me it was an erratic change that was inconsistent with our training it put poll workers safety at at stake um three days before the election uh due to this chatter i feel like social media and bullying is trying to take over our election process um using using coded and targeted language such as not policing pins that was very challenging for us because we know we went through the poll worker training that said that we have to use the felt-tip pins for accuracy and ballot reading and the tabulation and we didn't want to gum up the tabulator on election day that was a major concern and thank you i apologize we've run out of time but would love to you know i'm sure my colleagues and i would be happy to sit down with you and your colleagues for the record i do have materials for each of them board of supervisors these are emails that were sent to the co-directors of the elections and as i was going through and preparing for today i found the email from 2020 i sent that nobody responded to about intimidation at the polls even though it was very low uh it still did occur i had to call the police one time and i had to ask two observers to leave so thank you very much for the opportunity who did you get to talk with on friday i did talk to recorder richard all right i did talk to recorder richard i want to say this for the record as well regarding reporter richard i believe that he is a well-balanced man and i look forward to working with him again in our upcoming election cycle thank you all so much for listening thank you for your commitment thanks for your comments we appreciate it that's exactly how we get better uh in particular your comments with regard to safety just know we are we are all laser focused on that uh it's extremely important we're grateful that people remain safe our poll workers and our voters and that's something that we remain committed to and quite frankly let me just again um state so clearly how much i repudiate all the all the statements that have been made emails that have been sent threatening our workers and our voters it's unacceptable and it has to stop so thank you very much well full days and 16 hours on election day thank you it's our pleasure to serve thank you thank you okay and also uh we have from legislative district 26 timothy schwartz thank you mr chairman i wish okay thank you very much for being here we appreciate it okay so at this point now we do have a motion and a second any further we've heard from the public any further comments or discussion from my colleagues all in favor please say aye aye aye all opposed all right motion passes unanimously thank you very much uh now we will and and mr jarrett mentioned this uh previously we do have our next item uh which is item six and this is a petition for an automatic recount in the superior court of the state of arizona so we do have a justice of the peace race within three three votes and so we are uh required uh when we have this type of situation uh to vote as a board to we actually have to go to court uh to receive approval from the court to proceed with an automatic recount do you have any questions from my colleagues we do have mr larue here from the county attorney's office who would be available to answer any questions and and again i want to reiterate the the thanks that were provided by others up here to the county attorney's office throughout all of this election process any anything supervisor gallardo thank you the west mcdonald justice court is in district five i can tell you both candidates have lawyered up gotta love the democracy hey this is what it's all about you know it's okay um but the question that was was brought to me and and i don't know i mean this has been a long time since i've dealt with this but what's the involvement of the candidates in terms of do they get observers are they i mean i don't even know how this shapes out um but that was one of the questions that was asked to me like i don't know i know there's party observers that are we normally have but do the candidates get observers to be part of that process how does this work what's their involvement i guess so mr chairman supervisor gardo uh so the the political parties are the ones that are authorized to be in the tabulation center as we're doing the recounting however if the candidates themselves want to have a representative um they can be in our lobby ray and i are happy to walk them through and describe the entire process of exactly what's happening going on but every minute that we're counting there's big glass windows that they can see directly into that tabulation center and they're welcome to have those representatives and mr chairman and and uh scott i would just ask that you reach out to the two candidates um i know them both um they worked real hard in this election and and ran great campaigns and it's really it shows how important every vote counts and three votes i don't think i've ever seen anything that close before but yeah if you would reach out to them have them involved so they understand the process as well they probably have already reached out to you all but i know uh i know there's some high interest amongst the two candidates and i i understand it's what democracy is about it's open transparent it's everyone involved everyone understands how how this works vice chair hickman yeah um can you take us just quickly through the operational part if if that if it is deemed appropriate for a recount is that a hand recount or is that a through the through the machine mr chairman supervisor hickman so it will be a automatic recount that's completed by the tabulation equipment so um we in maricopa county right we're a early voting state we're also a vote center state so that means that those ballots are currently stored and organized in the batches in which we received them to maintain that chain of custody so we will have to go through what my team has been doing the last few days is identifying which batches those ballots are in right we can do that from our very robust reliable tabulation equipment right it creates a cast vote record and then we can trace those back to this is the batches where all those those ballots are these are the vote centers where those voters voted that type of ballot so then we can then identify those and that will reduce potentially the the number of ballots that will have to be recounted we will have to recount the entire batch so even if there's only one ballot in that batch that is eligibly recounted we have to do that entire batch we have to go through and do a logic and accuracy test to make sure that we're only tabulating that contest and reporting results for that contest we will have to send those ballots any that had overvotes or ambiguous marks that came through the early voting process and went through central account we'll have to send those through electronic adjudication as well so we'll be hiring electronic adjudication board members republican democrat independent um to then perform those actions uh i mentioned 4 500 ballots it's really 4 686 total ballots that were cast so just want to be very clear at the number of ballots that we'll be re recounting or through this recount process that is that just to me that's just incredibly interesting and shows just what you guys do in a massive election that you're going to be able to focus down through the steps that you've already done through the tabulated that we'll be going to be able to do a complete recount in a vote center model you know because those people that are in that jp area might have cast their vote in tempe because they work or in chandler at intel or something like that so um it's a great i'm going to be very interested to see how that goes because you never know if we have a general election we might have to do a very close one we might have to do this again on a general so very interesting mr chairman supervisor hickman one thing to note is one we're doing the recount and the tabulation those results aren't posted daily right so once the recount process continues and once we've completed it then we then provide those results to the filing officer and then those results are submitted to the court and the court is the one that opens those results for the first time so we will not be posting results on a daily basis mr chairman ray when was the last time this has happened you're the diner the fine wine there's the fine line at the table here um it's actually been over a decade so it was an ld and it was never to this small of a focus to a county race it was at a legislative race and then we've had one at a cd but it's been over decades wow okay any other questions or comments on uh item number six otherwise i would entertain emotions well we got the motion right did we okay sorry i don't have i don't okay thank you thanks for having me i was like man i'm losing track now may i'll i'll make the motion uh mr chairman on item number six two thank you the petition do you have a second mr chairman i will second that motion thank you motion in a second any further discussion all in favor say aye aye aye all opposed okay that motion passes unanimously thank you very much appreciate the presentation all right and before we wrap up uh i would entertain a motion to go into executive session so move mr chairman thank you second thank you motion second all in favor please say aye aye all opposed all right motion passes unanimously thanks everyone and uh the board of supervisors will now proceed into executive session you