Politics

Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and Republican Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer will host a Wednesday discussion on whether and how to change the way Arizonans vote and conduct elections.

What's happening: Fontes and Richer will talk at Valley Bar in downtown Phoenix at 6:30pm for a discussion on one of the hottest topics in state politics — the election system.

The Phoenix City Council might need a bigger dais soon.

What's happening: The council voted Wednesday to start the formal council redistricting process. During their discussion, four council members — Deb Stark, Jim Waring, Carlos Garcia and Sal DiCiccio — asked staff to look at adding more districts.

Former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords displayed her inextinguishable optimism in a New York Times interview published earlier this week about her continued fight for gun safety legislation.

Flashback: On Jan. 8, 2011, a gunman shot Giffords at point-blank range as she greeted constituents at a "Congress on your Corner" event at a Safeway outside Tucson.

Arizona enters Black History Month with no official critical race theory ban but with a political landscape that could still restrict how teachers build curriculum around race.

Why it matters: Pushes for so-called CRT bans in states with conservative legislatures, including Arizona, have led some educators to scrap once-noncontroversial Black history lessons over fears of firing and social media shaming, Axios' Russell Contreras reports from a new RAND Corporation survey.

California was the lone holdout on a proposed framework that six of the seven Colorado River basin states submitted to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation on Monday; but the plan could still be influential as the feds determines how to apportion water cutbacks that everyone will take.

Driving the news: Tuesday was the deadline for the seven basin states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — to reach an agreement.

Two GOP lawmakers are proposing to break up Maricopa County into four separate counties.

Driving the news: Rep. Alexander Kolodin, R-Scottsdale, sponsored HCR2018, which would refer the plan to the November 2024 ballot.

Arizona's Democratic and Republican parties will each have new leaders on Saturday when their respective state committees meet to elect new chairs.

Why it matters: State parties help dictate election strategy, determine how significant amounts of money are spent and generally set the tone for their parties.

More than 1,500 volunteers spread across metro Phoenix early Tuesday to find and count all the people experiencing homelessness in the Valley.

• They looked in encampments and alleys, along canals and railroad tracks, outside closed storefronts and in desert washes, at parks and in shelters.