This report card names sitting Arizona legislators and evaluates their public record on HOA legislation. That is legitimate comment on public officials’ public conduct — and it only stays legitimate because we hold ourselves to a hard standard. Here it is, in the open.
We are nonpartisan. BadHOA doesn’t care what party a legislator belongs to — we don’t factor it in, and it never touches a grade. We ask one question, the one that actually affects you: is this good for the homeowner, or good for the people making money off them? Republicans and Democrats alike take HOA-industry money and sponsor bills on both sides of that line, and our grades follow the record — not the letter after a name.
On every legislator’s page, the money, the votes, and the record list only entries tied to a checkable source: an AZ Secretary of State “See The Money” record, an azleg.gov bill page or roll call, a public document, or a dated news report. Each entry shows its source. If we can’t source it, it doesn’t appear — the loaders literally refuse a money or vote row with no source.
We track campaign money from the HOA industry: home builders and developers, the law firms that represent associations (community-association / “CAI” firms), and the large HOA management companies. Source is the AZ Secretary of State portal. One honest limitation we state up front: the state doesn’t code donors by industry, so we identify HOA-industry money by matching donors to a defined list of those firms, PACs, and their principals. A related limitation, stated plainly: some lobbying firms and PACs represent more than one industry, and the public filings don’t split a contribution by which client it was for. Rather than guess at an “HOA share” or drop the entry, we record the full amount from any firm that represents HOA, management-company, or homebuilder interests — and we tell you so right here. We’d rather show the whole trail — over-inclusive but transparent and checkable — than quietly gloss over money that reaches the people who write HOA law. Arizona’s Clean Elections public financing also means some members show little itemized money — a small figure, or none, is itself part of the record. Taking the money is not illegal and not, by itself, proof of anything — but we don’t treat it as weightless either. Money is a reward for support and buys access to the people who write HOA law, so (see grading below) the dollar amount weighs against a member’s grade, offset only by a real record of sponsoring homeowner-protection bills. It reaches both parties, and our grades ding both parties for it.
We record each member’s votes and sponsorships on HOA legislation from azleg.gov, and tag the direction of their action on that bill as Pro-homeowner, Pro-industry, Mixed, or Unclear. “Pro-homeowner” means expanding homeowner rights, transparency, or protections against the association; “pro-industry” means the opposite — shielding boards, managers, builders, or their law firms at owners’ expense. We judge each bill on its actual mechanics, not its title or its sponsor’s party — the devil is in the details. A measure that lets a board withhold records, take action in a closed meeting, define “available” records as a short closed list, or foreclose faster is pro-industry no matter what it’s named, because less transparency and fewer protections for owners is anti-homeowner, full stop. A “property-rights” title isn’t the same as a bill that actually helps owners. Sponsorship is the clean, affirmative signal and the backbone of the grade.
An honest word on floor votes. We show every member’s recorded HOA floor votes for transparency — but the contested ones (political signs, flags, and the like) split strictly along party lines: every Republican one way, every Democrat the other, on property-rights / speech questions that don’t cleanly pit homeowners against the HOA industry (which gives to both parties). Grading on those votes would just relabel “Republican” as pro-homeowner and “Democrat” as pro-industry — which would be false. So the contested floor votes are displayed but not used to move the grade. The genuinely homeowner-vs-industry reforms tend to pass with bipartisan support or die quietly in committee, which is why sponsorship and money — not floor votes — are the signals that separate members.
Documented public reporting — a member who publicly championed a homeowner-protection bill, or who carried water for the industry — is recorded as a sourced entry (a dated news report) and weighed in the grade. We record what a source says; we don’t characterize an absence of coverage as anything.
Every legislator with any record gets a letter grade — our answer to one question: did they work for Arizona homeowners, or for the HOA industry? We build it from two axes, and we’re transparent about the arithmetic:
- Record (lifts the grade) — the affirmative measure of working for owners. Prime-sponsoring a homeowner-protection HOA bill counts most; co-sponsoring counts too; sponsoring a pro-industry bill counts against.
- Money (lowers the grade, scaled by the dollar amount) — the more HOA-industry money a member has taken (AACM PAC + Veridus lobbyists + homebuilder/developer money, added together), the more it pulls the grade down. A few hundred dollars is a small deduction; five figures is a large one. Money is a reward for support, and we grade it as one.
- Record offsets money. The two axes net against each other, on purpose: a member who takes industry money and still sponsors real homeowner protections has earned back the benefit of the doubt and can still land a high grade; a member who takes the money and has done nothing for homeowners cannot.
The exact arithmetic — no hidden factors. A member’s record score is 3 × (prime-sponsored homeowner-protection bills) + 1.5 × (co-sponsored) − 3 × (prime-sponsored pro-industry bills) − 1.5 × (co-sponsored pro-industry). From that we subtract a money penalty that scales with the total HOA-industry dollars the member has taken. The net decides the letter. That is the entire formula.
No finger on the scale. Every grade is a pure, reproducible function of the sourced record and money — the same inputs always produce the same grade. Grades are recomputed automatically from the data on a schedule; there is no manual override and no way for us, or anyone, to hand-set a legislator’s grade up or down. The only way to change a grade is to change the underlying record it’s built from.
So, roughly: A / B = sponsored homeowner protections, enough to outweigh any money taken; C = little record either way, or a modest amount of industry money with nothing to offset it; D = a substantial amount of HOA-industry money and no homeowner-protection record to justify it; F = reserved for a member who actually sponsored pro-industry legislation on top of the money (we don’t hand out an F for taking money alone). The contested party-line floor votes above are shown but do not move the grade. A member with literally no record yet — newly seated, with no sponsorships, votes, or money — is left ungraded rather than guessed at. A grade is our assessment of a public official’s public record — not an accusation of any illegal deal.
The report card also grades the industry end — the lobbyists, PACs, management companies and law firms on our Follow the Money pages — on the same homeowner lens, each type by a formula suited to it:
- Lobbyists, PACs & home builders — graded on the sourced dollars they put into legislators and how many they reach (the See The Money figures, totaled the other way). Scale and directness set it: F the dominant operation (Veridus, with money in most of the Legislature), D a major direct player, C a backer one step removed.
- Management companies — start at C and drop for concrete homeowner-facing risk factors: being an AACM member (funding the PAC and Veridus), pursuing owners’ debts without a collection-agency license (an attorney-exemption or licensing gap), and portfolio size (the more Arizona homes it controls, the more owners its practices touch). The floor is D-; we don’t hand a company an F on this data alone.
- HOA law firms — graded on what the firm itself says it does. A firm that represents homeowners against associations earns an A; an HOA-side firm whose business model runs on collections — advancing costs and recovering its fees from the delinquent homeowner — rates a D-; other HOA-side firms land at D. A collections-model firm whose leadership also actively lobbies against homeowner-protection bills — documented in the public legislative record — drops to F.
- Advocacy groups & trade associations — graded on their sourced mission and their registered record at the Legislature. A homeowner-advocacy group that drafts and fights for owner protections earns an A; an industry trade association whose legislative committee works to block transparency and owner protections rates a D.
Where they stood — registered legislative positions. Arizona lets anyone register a public position (For, Against, or Neutral) on a bill through the Legislature’s Request to Speak system. We harvest that public record for every tracked HOA bill and show, on each entity’s page and each bill’s page, where the organizations and industry insiders stood. We include a position only when it is attributable to a group — either the person declared an organization, or they are a verified industry/advocacy insider (a law-firm partner, a CAI or AACM committee member, a management-company officer, or a named advocacy leader), each with a source. Private individual homeowners are never listed — this is accountability for organized influence, not a registry of citizens who spoke up. We show these positions as a factual record of where organized influence stood — nothing more. We do not treat a group’s support or opposition as making a bill good or bad, and it does not set our grade of that entity. We reach our own conclusion on every bill from its mechanics, and judge every entity on its own conduct; the positions are context you can check against the source, not our verdict.
An entity whose licensing or role we haven’t confirmed is listed but left unrated, never guessed. As with legislators, these grades are recomputed from the data on a schedule — no manual override.
The grade and any written assessment are opinion and fair comment. They sit in a visually distinct block, on top of the sourced facts they draw from — never blended into the money or vote records. That’s the same line the law draws between protected comment on public conduct and an unsupported assertion of fact, and we keep it visible so you can tell which is which.
Member portraits are the official Arizona Legislature roster photos. If a figure is wrong or a source doesn’t support what we said, tell us and we’ll fix it and note the correction — accuracy is the entire value of a page like this. Send a correction →
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