Governor Jan Brewer, who worked with Worsley and a handful of other legislators to push through Medicaid expansion, also worked the gang to make a special exception to the spending restrictions on the fund and approved a state budget bill provision that was tailor-made to give a loan to a Navajo County enterprise.
Lo and behold, the business in question was the Apache Railway Company, a small rail spur in Snowflake that currently employs eight people. That’s right; 8 people.
According to the Goldwater Institute, the last-minute legislative favor has heightened concerns among some legislators and watchdog organizations that the ACA staff and board of directors have used Arizona Competes Fund to finance pet projects. No clear evidence of this has emerged in the agency’s brief three-year existence. However, a recently released Goldwater Institute investigation has found that even if such questionable spending practices were a problem, the public would likely never know. This is because the laws governing the ACA exempt its staff and its board of directors from the typical disclosure and transparency requirements that other state agencies must abide – all in the name of protecting competition and trade secrets.
Goldwater Institute attorney Jon Riches said the special loan to the Apache Railway is undoubtedly “a brazen example of cronyism.”
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