APS is spending big to halt measure

Proposal would increase renewable requirements

Arizona’s largest utility has spent millions so far trying to derail an effort to ask voters to increase the state’s requirements for renewable energy.

What exactly the money was spent on is unclear.

Also unclear: whether the measure they oppose will even make the 2018 ballot.

In new campaign filings, Arizona Public Service Co.’s parent company reported spending nearly $6 million on a signature-gathering firm in the past few months. The company didn’t appear to gather any signatures to place a measure on the ballot.

The group’s spokesman refused to say what the millions were spent on, but the spending is unusual in Arizona politics. Typically, if a group spends millions on a signature-gathering firm, they are gathering signatures for a ballot effort.

The money spent by the utility giant is twice the amount spent by the group trying to actually put the measure on

the ballot.

The ballot measure — backed by Clean Energy for a Healthy Arizona — seeks to require utilities to get 50 percent of their power from renewable sources like solar and wind by 2030, a dramatic increase from current state goals.

In total, Arizonans for Affordable Electricity, a political action committee whose sole donor is APS parent company Pinnacle West, brought in more than $7.5 million this election cycle.

Most of that money, nearly $6 million, was spent on Petition Partners, a signature-gathering firm which the group labeled in campaign finance reports as “consultants.”

By contrast, the group backing the measure has brought in about $4.5 million this cycle. The group spent nearly $3 million on signature gathering firm Fieldworks — and submitted hundreds of thousands of signatures to the Arizona secretary of state.

Nearly all the clean-energy group’s funding came from a group backed by San Francisco billionaire Tom Steyer.

The clean-energy campaign contends the APSbacked group used dirty tactics to try to poach employees who were gathering signatures for the measure.

A memo dated July 3 from the clean-energy campaign outlines some of these efforts, like offering up to $7,500 to signature gatherers to leave the campaign.

The group also says people followed their staff into neighborhoods to try to “recruit, distract and intimidate them.” The memo claims the APSbacked group spent $200,000 to get two teams of signature gatherers to leave Arizona in the final days of the effort.

Matthew Benson, the spokesman for the APSbacked Arizonans for Affordable Electricity, said he wasn’t familiar with the claim, but would not respond to individual allegations the clean-energy campaign has made.

“They’re throwing a lot of anecdotes and allegations against the wall frankly to distract from the fact that 99.99 percent of the yes campaign’s donations have come from a single California billionaire and his superPAC,” Benson said. “This is all a distraction effort on their part.”

Benson would not answer what the group got from Petition Partners for its $6 million, saying he could not “disclose campaign strategy.”

“Every penny we’ve spent over the past six months has been aimed at defeating this ballot measure,” Benson said.

He added that it’s “not cheap” to sift through the campaign’s signatures to find fraud, or look into registered circulators to see whether they have criminal records, something he has repeatedly highlighted on Twitter.

Petition Partners has been a part of those efforts, Benson said.

Petition Partners owner Drew Chavez referred questions to the campaign when asked what activities the money supported.

Rodd McLeod, a spokesman for the cleanenergy campaign, called the effort by the APSbacked group “some kooky signature-gathering scheme.”

The spending sought to deny voters the opportunity to vote on the cleanenergy increase, McLeod said.

“Why are they so afraid of voters having a choice?” he said.

This isn’t the first time a group affiliated with APS has spent money to try to keep something off the ballot.

In 2016, SolarCity said it would spend millions to ask voters to protect solar net metering. Summit Consulting Group, a firm that has ties to APS, hired circulators to gather signatures on a sham survey, under the condition those circulators not work for the SolarCity effort, the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting wrote at the time.

In total, Pinnacle West has donated more than $10 million this cycle to two groups, one to spend against the clean-energy measure and one to spend on candidates.