Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery told a Yellow Sheet reporter last week “that he is eager to pick up where Horne’s investigation left off” in the matter of Arizona’s Independent Redistricting Commission. Montgomery told the reporter, “I think it’s important, particularly with respect to the public, to have confidence in the IRC’s operations and for us to know whether something occurred.”
Montgomery was referring to the inquiry into the commission’s consideration and hiring of Strategic Telemetry. That inquiry was stopped by ruling by Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Dean Fink that IRC commissioners were not bound by state open meeting laws and were also protected by legislative privilege.
That ruling is being appealed. A reversal would allow Montgomery conduct interviews with commissioners Herrera, Mathis and McNulty. According to the Yellow Sheet, Montgomery said the commissioners’ refusal to comply with Horne’s investigation, including interviews, contributed to a loss of public confidence in the redistricting process. “The fact that we haven’t been able to conduct the investigation allows everyone to speculate to one degree or another, and I don’t think that is healthy.”
The commissioners refused to comply with the inquiry citing their desire to set a precedent that the IRC was independent from other political entities.
Montgomery told the Yellow Sheet that he found it “disappointing” that the three commissioners chose to reinterpret open meeting laws after being counseled that the law applies to the commission: “I’ll say this, it would have been far better for them to simply cooperate and put all of this to rest if there wasn’t any wrongdoing.”
Republicans are considering various legal options to force the commissioners to reveal what occurred in the process they employed to hire Strategic Telemetry. Strategic Telemetry was hired by the commissioners to develop the redistricting maps. They have been used in the past by democratic groups including the Obama campaign.