A former Foreign Service Officer who has served in several of the world’s global hot spots like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Lebanon, Joshua Polacheck has set his sights on becoming a member of the Arizona Corporation Commission.
His worldview is shaped in part by his experiences in seeing Jamaica work to shift to a clean-renewable energy platform. He and his fellow Democrats — running for seats on what some observers have called Arizona’s fourth branch of government — are aghast at the current MAGA Republican majority’s obsessive zeal to shift energy policy to yesterday’s resources of oil and coal (that only helps rich oil plutocrats in this country, the Middle East, and Russia) while abandoning clean energy alternatives that will protect the environment and move society forward.
If elected this fall along with his colleagues, Mr. Polacheck will work to shift the Commission’s mission on making Arizona like Texas and restore the clean energy renewable standards that the current MAGA majority is looking to do away with. They would also expand them.
Mr. Polacheck graciously took the time to respond to questions about his candidacy for the Arizona Corporation Commission. The questions and his responses are below.
- Please tell everybody really two reasons they should vote for both of you over your opponents in the race for the Arizona Corporation Commission.
“I’ll give you three reasons. Do you want your power and water to be affordable? Do you want it to be reliable? Do you want it to be secure now and for the future? Or do you want to bring the Texas grid to Arizona? Currently, right now, the current MAGA majority on the Corporation Commission has blown up our clean energy transition plan, and we are going to end up with power that’s neither affordable, reliable, nor secure, and we’re going to be hooked onto a commodities market that’s unpredictable and is dirty and ties our energy and economic future, not to the Arizona sunshine, but to 150-year-old technology where the inputs are coming from Putin’s Russia, the unstable Middle East, and Texas.”
- What are at least two or three major issues in the Arizona Corporation Commission race this cycle?
“I think the big issue, and this is facing everyone, and you know, we’ve seen our rates go up. Our bills are going up. We’re worried about our water. We’re worried about the quality of our air. All of this ties back to whether or not the Corporation Commission sets up the structure to have an energy Independence transition in Arizona based on clean energy or whether they tie us back to a generation of dirty energy again through these unpredictable Commodities.
I think the big issue that we’re facing right now is that we have a Corporation Commission that’s in the pocket of the utilities. It’s in the pocket of big oil. And so that’s the number one thing. Its job is to ensure that our utilities are affordable and reliable. They’re not doing that. There are a bunch of other issues that the Corporation Commission is also responsible for, and due to the reluctance to work hard by searching Commissioners and some, I would say, questionable judgment and how they’re using the resources of the commission, the commission is not able to focus on some of its other core missions, but first and foremost if your bills are too darn high and you’re worried about the future of your power and water, do you want to make those investments now where we can have secure energy independence based on clean technology, or do you want to bring the Texas power grid to Arizona?”
- Please describe your campaign strategy to reach voters in all of Arizona’s 15 counties and drive up turnout. Also, how will you convince Independents and Disaffected Republicans to vote for you?
“I’ll take the second one first. Ylenia Aguilar and I both believe that this is a race where there’s a clear constitutional mission for the Commission. It’s to provide affordable and reliable utilities to Arizona families, businesses, and industry. Currently, the Commission is playing politics with our essential utilities. The four-to-one MAGA majority on the Commission is more interested in paying back their big oil donors and more interested in scoring political points and playing the culture war than it is and its constitutional mandate of governance. Because of that, it’s unclear whether our partners in the utilities are going to be able to get the financing they need to make the essential investments in Arizona’s energy Independence future. I believe that that’s a message that is not a partisan message.
I’m pretty sure whether you’re talking to a car dealer in the Eastern Valley, whether you’re talking to an activist in Central Tucson, whether you’re talking to a cotton farmer in Pinal — everyone wants to know that when the when the summer heat comes, and things get brutal and they flip on their AC they know that the electricity’s going to work and they know that they’re not going to have to pay an arm and a leg for that electricity or they do not want to have to pay an arm and a leg for that electricity. They want to know that the water coming out of their tap is going to be there not just tomorrow but five, ten, fifty and a hundred years from now and the current Commission is very much not serving the interests of Arizonans. They are in the pocket of out-of-state Big Oil folks, and they are they’re not living up to their constitutional responsibilities. And that’s a message that I think you can take to whether we’re going to the rural communities along our southern, eastern, western, and northern borders. That’s a message that you can take to the suburbs outside of Phoenix and Tucson. That’s a message you can take to the core cities and in Tucson, Phoenix, Flagstaff, Sierra Vista , and Yuma. Our strategy is to is just to tell the voters. This is what we plan to do if you entrust us with control of the Commission. This is what the current Commission is currently doing. I think that’s a message that’s going to resonate with Arizona families and small and medium-sized business owners and of course our leaders across the state.”
How will you drive up with turnout in in your race to match some of the more headline races?
“Part of that is getting the message. So, making sure that we talk to folks across the state either through conversations like this with media, but also, we understand there’s going to be hundreds of millions if not a billion dollars spent by the Presidential and Senate campaigns. A lot of that’s going to be spent on television and social media advertising and for race like this, you know the Corporation Commission fits in that sort of sweet spot. We’re not a city councilmember where you can call us and complain about a pothole right. But we’re not always working in Washington on national issues that may be kind of disconnected from your day-to-day life. Whether or not your electricity bill is going up more than your income is going up. Whether or not your electricity is reliable. Whether or not you are going to have reliable water. Whether or not your telecoms; there’s market-based competition here in telecoms. One of the things people don’t hear enough about is that we have a chance if we really have a market-based situation in our Telecom space with a lot of the federal public investment out there. We have a potential to really have fiber across the entire State not just in some core areas, but people could have residential fiber with some major public private Investments as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act all the way including our rural areas.”
“So I think our message is going to be we’re going to look at those areas where turnout is low and where people have not felt inspired to vote for candidates. I mean, especially Disaffected Republicans and Independents where Arizona’s a state where we just want our government to work right? We’re a state that’s famous for having some of the lowest rates for getting or driver’s license. I remember when I was in college. Can I show people that my driver’s license was good until I was 65. Everyone was shocked but you know all these people coming, you know, whether they’re coming from the Midwest or the Northeast and they’re like, oh man, I gotta pay 100 bucks to get my driver’s license renewed every two years. I’m like, well, I paid 15 bucks, and it’s good until I’m 65, right? We’re a state where we want our government to work. We don’t want people to be playing politics with our essential utilities, and that’s a message that I believe resonates across party lines, and whether you’re a union member working to fix the electricity lines. Whether you’re somebody helping out your teacher in the schools. Whether you’re a small business owner, this is a message that that’s going to resonate.”
- Is there anything not covered in the first three questions that you would like the voters to know about you and your colleague’s candidacy for the Corporation Commission? Please explain.
“The thing about me I hope people understand is so right after college, I was commissioned in the US State Department as a Foreign Service Officer. I spent nearly 20 years in the Foreign Service, and I served in places including Northern Iraq as the Provincial Spokesperson for the Coalition during the surge in 2007-2008. I also served in Pakistan and spent significant time in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Zimbabwe, and India. I did a tour in Washington. I was in Jamaica, and we did a lot of commercial promotion there and one of the things I was most proud of is Jamaica was trying to wean its dependence off the global oil market for its national power grid. They’re very similar to the U.S. or to Arizona. They have about three million people. They’ve got a public privately owned monopoly for their power company and the government said ‘look we want energy Independence. We know that over the long term the levelized cost of energy if we bring in solar and wind to our nation is going to make things cheaper for us. It’s going to make it easier to do business development. It’s going to be it’s going to make sure that people have reliable power’ I helped American companies when these projects and so I saw the impact that it could have on a developing or a middle-income country when they brought in clean energy to help boost their energy independence.”
“I don’t know why we are not using that same American innovation to bring energy and dependence to Arizona. For me it’s a national security issue. I have seen what happens when you have autocrats using their energy diplomacy as it’s called whether we’re talking about Putin’s Russia or autocrats in the Middle East. I understand, again not an engineer, but I can look out my window and see the Arizona sunshine 300-plus days a year, and I know that we have an opportunity to build affordable, reliable, and secure energy Independence and our state if we can bring Innovative clean Technologies clean energy to the state. The money is there. The suits have already decided. This is how it’s going to work and whether or not we have a Corporation Commission that works together to make sure that transition happens or if they try to act as a non-market roadblock right now, which is what they’re doing. I want to be a third generation Arizonan. I want my kid to feel that she has a future in this state. That it’s a place that’s livable because we have made an example, not just for Arizona and not just for the Southwest Region, not even just for the United States, but where we make an example for the world about how we can use market-based tools to get to a clean energy transition and a future that our children can live in.”
Is there anything else you would like to add?
“I mean the main thing is this is a race that doesn’t have the same sort of like high-level visibility. So I hope you include in the article to send people to the Secretary of State’s run electronic signature platform called E-qual. This is one of these Arizona Innovations. We used to be famous for having really well-run elections. A lot of people who have an objective viewpoint of what goes on with our elections still think that Arizona does a pretty darn good job with our elections and so each of us are about let’s see, about 15 percent of the way to collecting our signatures as of February 15th, and we only have a six weeks left because the deadline got moved up because some people in 2022 didn’t do their homework on the primary elections. And so, they changed the election law and didn’t actually fix any of the other stuff about it. So, we have a long road to do but we encourage people to go to E-Qual and sign our petition.
Please click the below link if you would like to sign Mr. Polacheck’s petition.
https://apps.azsos.gov/apps/election/eps/op/
For more information on Mr. Polacheck and his candidacy for the Corporation Commission, please check on the below social media sites.
FB page: JoshuaForArizona
IG: @JoshuaP_AZ
X/Twitter: @JoshuaP_AZ